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Bitter Flowers by Gunnar Staalesen. London. 2022. Orenda Books. 9781913193089. Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett. 321 pages. paperback.  

DESCRIPTION - PI Varg Veum has returned to duty following a stint in rehab, but his new composure and resolution are soon threatened when a challenging assignment arrives on his desk. A man is found dead in an elite swimming pool and a young woman has gone missing. Most chillingly, Varg Veum is asked to investigate the ‘Camilla Case’: an eight-year-old cold case involving the disappearance of a little girl, who was never found. As the threads of these apparently unrelated crimes come together, against the backdrop of a series of shocking environmental crimes, Varg Veum faces the most challenging, traumatic investigation of his career.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gunnar Staalesen was born in Bergen In 1947 and was educated at the University of Bergen. For the past ten years he has worked as information secretary at Bergen's only theatre, The National Stage. Since 1975 he has published eight crime novels, of which AT NIGHT ALL WOLVES ARE GREY is the most recent. The earliest of Staalesen's books were police mysteries; his later books are about Varg Veum, a Norwegian private detective. The critic Nils Nordberg wrote of the second Varg Veum novel, TILL DEATH DO US PART (1979), that it was ‘one of the finest, most serious, most ambitious books in post-war Norwegian crime writing.'

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Mirror Image by Gunnar Staalesen. London. 2023. Orenda Books. 9781914585944. Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett. 293 pages. paperback.  

DESCRIPTION - Bergen Private Investigator Varg Veum is perplexed when two wildly different cases cross his desk at the same time. A lawyer, anxious to protect her privacy, asks Varg to find her sister, who has disappeared with her husband, seemingly without trace, while a ship carrying unknown cargo is heading towards the Norwegian coast, and the authorities need answers. Varg immerses himself in the investigations, and it becomes clear that the two cases are linked, and have unsettling – and increasingly uncanny – similarities to events that took place thirty-six years earlier, when a woman and her saxophonist lover drove their car off a cliff, in an apparent double suicide. As Varg is drawn into a complex case involving star-crossed lovers, toxic waste and illegal immigrants, history seems determined to repeat itself in perfect detail … and at terrifying cost. A chilling, dark and twisting story of love and revenge, Mirror Image is Staalesen at his most thrilling, thought-provoking best.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gunnar Staalesen was born in Bergen In 1947 and was educated at the University of Bergen. For the past ten years he has worked as information secretary at Bergen's only theatre, The National Stage. Since 1975 he has published eight crime novels, of which AT NIGHT ALL WOLVES ARE GREY is the most recent. The earliest of Staalesen's books were police mysteries; his later books are about Varg Veum, a Norwegian private detective. The critic Nils Nordberg wrote of the second Varg Veum novel, TILL DEATH DO US PART (1979), that it was ‘one of the finest, most serious, most ambitious books in post-war Norwegian crime writing.'

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Wolves in the Dark by Gunnar Staalesen. London. 2017. Orenda Books. 9781910633724. Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett. 305 pages. paperback.  

DESCRIPTION - Reeling from the death of his great love, Karin, Varg Veum’s life has descended into a self-destructive spiral of alcohol, lust, grief and blackouts. When traces of child pornography are found on his computer, he’s accused of being part of a paedophile ring and thrown into a prison cell. There, he struggles to sift through his past to work out who is responsible for planting the material … and who is seeking the ultimate revenge. When a chance to escape presents itself, Varg finds himself on the run in his hometown of Bergen. With the clock ticking and the police on his tail, Varg takes on his hardest – and most personal – case yet. Dark, emotive and compulsive, Wolves in the Dark is the absorbing, shocking next instalment in the addictive Varg Veum series, by one of the fathers of Nordic Noir.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gunnar Staalesen was born in Bergen In 1947 and was educated at the University of Bergen. For the past ten years he has worked as information secretary at Bergen's only theatre, The National Stage. Since 1975 he has published eight crime novels, of which AT NIGHT ALL WOLVES ARE GREY is the most recent. The earliest of Staalesen's books were police mysteries; his later books are about Varg Veum, a Norwegian private detective. The critic Nils Nordberg wrote of the second Varg Veum novel, TILL DEATH DO US PART (1979), that it was ‘one of the finest, most serious, most ambitious books in post-war Norwegian crime writing.'

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We Shall Inherit the Wind by Gunnar Staalesen. London. 2015. Orenda Books. 9781910633076. Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett. 263 pages. paperback. Cover photograph - Shutterstock. Cover design by kid-ethic.com.  

DESCRIPTION - 1998. Varg Veum sits by the hospital bedside of his long-term girlfriend Karin, whose life-threatening injuries provide a deeply painful reminder of the mistakes he's made. Investigating the seemingly innocent disappearance of a wind-farm inspector, Varg Veum is thrust into one of the most challenging cases of his career, riddled with conflicts, environmental terrorism, religious fanaticism, unsolved mysteries and dubious business ethics. Then, in one of the most heart-stopping scenes in crime fiction, the first body appears. A chilling, timeless story of love, revenge and desire, We Shall Inherit the Wind deftly weaves contemporary issues with a stunning plot that will leave you gripped to the final page. This is Staalesen at his most thrilling, thought-provoking best. 'The Varg Veum series is more concerned with character and motivation than spectacle, and it's in the quieter scenes that the real drama lies.' Herald Scotland. 'Staalesen is one of my very favourite Scandinavian authors and this is a series with very sharp teeth' Ian Rankin. ‘A Norwegian Chandler' Jo Nesbo. ‘Gunnar Staalesen was writing suspenseful and socially conscious Nordic Noir long before any of today's Swedish crime writers had managed to put together a single book page … one of Norway's most skillful storytellers' Johan Theorin. ‘Razor-edged Scandinavian crime fiction at its finest' Quentin Bates. ‘Not many books hook you in the first chapter - this one did, and never let go!' Mari Hannah.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gunnar Staalesen was born in Bergen In 1947 and was educated at the University of Bergen. For the past ten years he has worked as information secretary at Bergen's only theatre, The National Stage. Since 1975 he has published eight crime novels, of which AT NIGHT ALL WOLVES ARE GREY is the most recent. The earliest of Staalesen's books were police mysteries; his later books are about Varg Veum, a Norwegian private detective. The critic Nils Nordberg wrote of the second Varg Veum novel, TILL DEATH DO US PART (1979), that it was ‘one of the finest, most serious, most ambitious books in post-war Norwegian crime writing.'

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Big Sister by Gunnar Staalesen. London. 2018. Orenda Books. 9781912374199. Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett. 259 pages. paperback. Cover photograph - Shutterstock. Cover design by kid-ethic.com.  

DESCRIPTION - Chilling, shocking and exceptionally gripping, Big Sister reaffirms Gunnar Staalesen as one of the world's foremost thriller writers. Varg Veum receives a surprise visit in his office. A woman introduces herself as his half-sister, and she has a job for him. Her god-daughter, a 19-year-old trainee nurse from Haugesund, moved from her apartment in Bergen two weeks ago. Since then no one has heard anything from her. She didn't leave an address. She doesn't answer her phone. And the police refuse to take her case seriously. Veum's investigation uncovers a series of carefully covered-up crimes and pent-up hatreds, and the trail leads to a gang of extreme bikers on the hunt for a group of people whose dark deeds are hidden by the anonymity of the Internet. And then things get personal.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gunnar Staalesen was born in Bergen In 1947 and was educated at the University of Bergen. For the past ten years he has worked as information secretary at Bergen's only theatre, The National Stage. Since 1975 he has published eight crime novels, of which AT NIGHT ALL WOLVES ARE GREY is the most recent. The earliest of Staalesen's books were police mysteries; his later books are about Varg Veum, a Norwegian private detective. The critic Nils Nordberg wrote of the second Varg Veum novel, TILL DEATH DO US PART (1979), that it was ‘one of the finest, most serious, most ambitious books in post-war Norwegian crime writing.'

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The Consorts of Death by Gunnar  Staalesen. London. 2014. Arcadia Books. 9781906413385. 272 pages. paperback.  

DESCRIPTION - September 1995. Veum is in his office when a telephone conversation takes him back 25 years, to a case he was involved in while working as a child protection officer, in the summer of 1970. A small boy was seperated from his mother under tragic circumstances. But that was not the end of it. In 1974 the same boy surfaced in connection with a sudden death in his new home. And again ten years later, in connection with a dramatic double-murder in Sunnfjord. The boy is now an adult, on the run in Oslo, determined to take revenge on those responsible for destroying his life, among them the former child protection officer, now detective Veum.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gunnar Staalesen was born in Bergen In 1947 and was educated at the University of Bergen. For the past ten years he has worked as information secretary at Bergen's only theatre, The National Stage. Since 1975 he has published eight crime novels, of which AT NIGHT ALL WOLVES ARE GREY is the most recent. The earliest of Staalesen's books were police mysteries; his later books are about Varg Veum, a Norwegian private detective. The critic Nils Nordberg wrote of the second Varg Veum novel, TILL DEATH DO US PART (1979), that it was ‘one of the finest, most serious, most ambitious books in post-war Norwegian crime writing.'

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Cold Hearts by Gunnar Staalesen. London. 2013. Arcadia Books. 9781908129437. 300 pages. paperback. Cover photograph: Image Sourse.  

DESCRIPTION - On a frosty January day in Bergen, Norway, private investigator Varg Veum is visited by a prostitute. Her friend Margrethe has disappeared and hasn't been seen for days. Before her disappearance, something had unsettled her: she'd turned away a customer and returned to the neighbourhood in terror. Shortly after taking the case, Veum is confronted with a brutal, uneasy reality. He soon finds the first body - and it won't be the last. His investigation leads him into a dark subculture where corrupted idealism has had deadly consequences. Dark secrets lurk everywhere, as the murky pattern of wounded people, worm-eaten lives, and hearts long grown cold proves deadly … for someone. A dramatic, poetic and page-turning thriller from Norway's most dazzling crime writer.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gunnar Staalesen was born in Bergen In 1947 and was educated at the University of Bergen. For the past ten years he has worked as information secretary at Bergen's only theatre, The National Stage. Since 1975 he has published eight crime novels, of which AT NIGHT ALL WOLVES ARE GREY is the most recent. The earliest of Staalesen's books were police mysteries; his later books are about Varg Veum, a Norwegian private detective. The critic Nils Nordberg wrote of the second Varg Veum novel, TILL DEATH DO US PART (1979), that it was ‘one of the finest, most serious, most ambitious books in post-war Norwegian crime writing.'

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The Writing On the Wall by Gunnar Staalesen. London. 2004. Arcade Publishing. 1900850583. Translated from the Norwegian by Hal Sutcliffe. 264 pages. paperback. Cover design by Eleanor Rose.  

DESCRIPTION - In this crime drama detective Varg Veum's adventures lead him to a dark world of privileged, young teenage girls who have been drawn into drugs and prostitution. The situation worsens when the local judge is discovered in a luxury hotel, dead and clad only in women's lingerie. Called in by anxious parents and officials to look for a missing daughter and explain the judge's death, Varg finds clues that lead him only deeper into the city's criminal underworld. Gunnar Staalesen is one of Norway's leading crime writers. His Varg Veum books have been translated into 12 languages. He lives in Bergen, Norway.
 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gunnar Staalesen was born in Bergen In 1947 and was educated at the University of Bergen. For the past ten years he has worked as information secretary at Bergen's only theatre, The National Stage. Since 1975 he has published eight crime novels, of which AT NIGHT ALL WOLVES ARE GREY is the most recent. The earliest of Staalesen's books were police mysteries; his later books are about Varg Veum, a Norwegian private detective. The critic Nils Nordberg wrote of the second Varg Veum novel, TILL DEATH DO US PART (1979), that it was ‘one of the finest, most serious, most ambitious books in post-war Norwegian crime writing.'

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At Night All Wolves Are Grey by Gunnar Staalesen. London. 1986. Quartet Books. 0704325586. Translated from the Norwegian by David McDuff. 214 pages. hardcover. Cover photograph by Stephen Baxter. Cover design by Namara Design.  

DESCRIPTION - Varg Veum is a down-at-heel private detective in Bergen, Norway. Fond of akvavit, he has a broken marriage behind him and is training to run a marathon. A chance conversation with a retired policeman arouses his interest in two old, unsolved cases: a disastrous fire in a paint factory caused by arson in 1953, and the brutal murder of a suspected Gestapo informer and hired killer nearly twenty years later. Veum sifts meticulously through the past, is threatened and beaten up as he interviews millionaires and down-and-outs, but eventually brings his investigations to a surprising - even shocking - conclusion. AT NIGHT ALL WOLVES ARE GREY is a complex, richly textured novel in the tradition of Raymond Chandler or Ross Macdonald, yet at the same time Staalesen writes originally and with an unmistakable individuality. As well as being an exciting thriller, the book tells us a good deal about contemporary Norway, and the setting, Bergen, emerges as a living city, through whose streets and harbour alleyways Veum roams in search of the recent past.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gunnar Staalesen was born in Bergen In 1947 and was educated at the University of Bergen. For the past ten years he has worked as information secretary at Bergen's only theatre, The National Stage. Since 1975 he has published eight crime novels, of which AT NIGHT ALL WOLVES ARE GREY is the most recent. The earliest of Staalesen's books were police mysteries; his later books are about Varg Veum, a Norwegian private detective. The critic Nils Nordberg wrote of the second Varg Veum novel, TILL DEATH DO US PART (1979), that it was ‘one of the finest, most serious, most ambitious books in post-war Norwegian crime writing.'. David McDuff is a translator and literary critic at present living in Greenwich, London. His published works include the SELECTED POEMS OF OSIP MANDELSTAM (Writers & Readers, 1983) and the COMPLETE POEMS OF EDITH SODERGRAN (Bloodaxe Books, 1984). He has translated several volumes of 19th- century Russian prose fiction for the Penguin Classics series.

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Yours Until Death by Gunnar Staalesen. London. 1993. Constable . 009471990x. Translated from the Norwegian by Margaret Amassian. 238 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration by Terry Pastor. Jacket design by Splash Studio.  

DESCRIPTION - The single-mother families of the isolated high-rise community under the shadow of the Lyderhorn, Bergen's great mountain - steep, dark and oppressive - were being robbed, terrorised and molested by a teen-age gang led by the psychopath, Joker, who looked like a priest, but with the eyes of a tiger and the teeth of a decaying corpse. It was at their ‘torture chamber', a hut in the pine woods nearby, that Varg Veum, Private Investigator, first encountered the gang's pathetic but deadly ferocity. Eight-year-old Roar's bicycle had been stolen and not an adult in sight dared retrieve it. But a preliminary brush with such youthful violence was as nothing compared to what awaited Veum when he got to know Roar's blue-eyed, shy yet sensuous mother, Wenche Andresen, and her estranged husband, Jonas. Veum's attempts to break up Joker and his pack of young thugs by enlisting the help of the local youth club leader proved a dead end. But not so dead as the man who lay prone with a knife in his back on the floor of Andresen's flat. YOURS UNTIL DEATH is an unbearably tense novel of revenge and murder from which emerge moving statements about modern marriage, childhood bereavement and the destructive force of passion. First published in Norwegian in 1979, it was described by the critic Nils Nordberg as ‘one of the finest, most serious, most ambitious books in post-war Norwegian crime writing'.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gunnar Staalesen was born in Bergen in 1947 and was educated at the University of Bergen. For thirteen years he was employed as the Information Manager of The National Stage, Bergen's only theatre. He is now a full time writer. In 1991 he was awarded the international Palle Rosenkrantz Prize for the best crime story published in Denmark that year. He is the author of twelve novels, nine of which feature Varg Veum. He has also written two adventure books for children, three plays for the stage and two radio plays. His work has been translated into German, French and Dutch, as well as English.

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The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley. New York. 1978. Random House. 0394419464. 259 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - Tough, hard-boiled, and brilliantly suspenseful, The Last Good Kiss is an unforgettable detective story starring C. W. Sughrue, a Montana investigator who kills time by working at a topless bar. Hired to track down a derelict author, he ends up on the trail of a girl missing in Haight-Ashbury for a decade. The tense hunt becomes obsessive as Sughrue takes a haunting journey through the underbelly of America's sleaziest nightmares.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Arthur Crumley (October 12, 1939 - September 17, 2008) was the author of violent hardboiled crime novels and several volumes of short stories and essays, as well as published and unpublished screenplays. He has been described as ‘one of modern crime writing's best practitioners', who was ‘a patron saint of the post-Vietnam private eye novel' and a cross between Raymond Chandler and Hunter S. Thompson. His book The Last Good Kiss has been described as ‘the most influential crime novel of the last 50 years.' Crumley had a cult following, and his work is said to have inspired a generation of crime writers in both the U.S. and the U.K, including Michael Connelly, George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane and Craig McDonald, as well as writers from other genres such as Neal Stephenson, but he never achieved mainstream success. ‘Don't know why that is,' Crumley said in an interview in 2001, ‘Other writers like me a lot. But up until about 10 to 12 years ago, I made more money in France and Japan than in America. I guess I just don't fit in anyplace' in the genre book marketplace. Crumley's first published novel, 1969's One to Count Cadence, which was set in the Philippines and Vietnam, began as the thesis for his master's degree in creative writing from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1966. His novels The Last Good Kiss, The Mexican Tree Duck and The Right Madness feature the character C.W. Sughrue, an alcoholic ex-army officer turned private investigator. The Wrong Case, Dancing Bear and The Final Country feature another p.i., Milo Milodragovitch. In the novel Bordersnakes, Crumley brought both characters together. Crumley said of his two private detectives: ‘Milo's first impulse is to help you; Sughrue's is to shoot you in the foot.'

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The Burgler by David Goodis. New York. 1991. Vintage Crime/Black Lizard. 0679734724. 156 pages. paperback. . Cover design by Keith Sheridan Associates, Inc. Cover photography by Alesia Exum.  

DESCRIPTION -  ‘If Jack Kerouac had written crime novels, they might have sounded a bit like this.' - Geoffrey O'Brien. Nat Harbin is a family man. His family happens to be a gang of burglars. Now Nat has met a woman so hypnotic ally seductive that he will leave his partners and his trade to possess her. But you don't get away from family that easily. THE BURGLAR has the hallmarks that made David Goodis one of the great practitioners of the hard-boiled crime novel: a haunting identification with life's losers, and a hero who finds out who he is only by betraying everything he believes in.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Loeb Goodis (March 2, 1917 - January 7, 1967) was an American writer of crime fiction, noted for his prolific output of short stories and novels epitomizing the noir fiction genre. A native of Philadelphia, Goodis alternately resided there and in New York City and Hollywood during his professional years. Yet, throughout his life he maintained a deep identification with the city of his birth, Philadelphia. Goodis cultivated the skid row neighborhoods of his home town, using what he observed to craft his hard-boiled sagas of lives gone wrong, realized in dark portrayals of a blighted urban landscape teeming with criminal life and human despair. ‘Despite his [university] education, a combination of ethnicity (Jewish) and temperament allowed him to empathize with outsiders: the working poor, the unjustly accused, fugitives, criminals.' Goodis was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the oldest child of William Goodis and Mollie Halpern Goodis. William Goodis was a Russian-Jewish Emigre born in 1882, who had arrived in America with his mother in 1890. David Goodis's mother Mollie Halpern was born in Pennsylvania also into a family of Russian-Jewish Emigres. In Philadelphia, Goodis's father co-owned a newspaper dealership and later went into the textile business as the William Goodis Company. A brother, Jerome, born in 1920, died of meningitis at age three. In 1922, another brother, Herbert, was born into the family. In high school Goodis was engaged in student affairs, editing the school newspaper, serving as student council president, and participating in athletics as a member of both the track and swim teams. He also had the distinction of being chosen valedictorian for the graduating class of 1935, delivering a speech entitled ‘Youth Looks at Peace'. As a college student, he continued and expanded on the interests he had pursued as a high school student, contributing to the student newspaper as both writer and cartoonist. It was during this period he purportedly attempted his hand at novel writing, a book titled Ignited. The novel was never published, and no copy of it has been discovered. Goodis later claimed: ‘The title was prophetic. Eventually I threw it into the furnace.' Goodis graduated from Temple University in 1938 with a degree in journalism. While working at an advertising agency, Goodis started writing his first novel, Retreat from Oblivion. After it was published by Dutton in 1939, Goodis moved to New York City, where he wrote under several pseudonyms for pulp magazines, including Battle Birds, Daredevil Aces, Dime Mystery, Horror Stories, Terror Tales and Western Tales, sometimes churning out 10,000 words a day. The first pulp story published under his own name appeared in Gangland Detective Stories (November, 1939), titled ‘Mistress of the White Slave King'. Over a five-and-a-half-year period, according to some sources, he produced five million words for the pulp magazines. While the quantity of his output far eclipses that of his predecessors Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, unlike theirs, the vast majority of his pulp stories have never been reprinted. During the 1940s, Goodis scripted for radio adventure serials, including Hop Harrigan, House of Mystery, and Superman. Novels he wrote during the early 1940s were rejected by publishers, but in 1942 he spent some time in Hollywood as one of the screenwriters on Universal's Destination Unknown. His big break came in 1946 when his novel Dark Passage was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, published by Julian Messner and filmed for Warner Bros. with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall heading the cast. Delmer Daves directed what is now regarded as a classic film noir, and a first edition of the 1946 hardcover is valued at more than $800. Arriving in Hollywood, Goodis signed a six-year contract with Warner Brothers, working on story treatments and scripts. In 1947, Goodis wrote the script for The Unfaithful, a remake of Somerset Maugham's The Letter. Some of his scripts were never produced, such as Of Missing Persons and an adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake. Working with director Delmer Daves, he wrote a screen treatment for a film, Up Till Now, which Daves described as ‘giving people a look at themselves and their [American] heritage'. This film too was never made but Goodis used some of its elements in his 1954 novel, The Blonde on the Street Corner. Goodis is also credited with writing the screenplay to The Burglar, a 1957 film noir directed by Paul Wendkos that was based on his 1953 novel published by Lion Books. It was the only solely authored screenplay to be produced by him. The film was written and directed by Philadelphians, as well as being shot in Philadelphia. Dan Duryea and Jayne Mansfield were cast in the lead roles, and The Burglar still stands as one of the greatest heist films ever made. It was re-made in 1971 by Henri Verneuil as the French-Italian film Le Casse, starring Omar Sharif. Until recently, it was generally believed that Goodis never married. His friend Harold ‘Dutch' Silver said Goodis never spoke of a wife, and no wife was mentioned in Goodis's obituary. Attorney correspondence also repeatedly stated that Goodis never married. However, research by Larry Withers and Louis Boxer has produced a marriage license for Goodis and Elaine Astor. It shows that they were married on October 7, 1943 by Rabbi Jacob Samuel Robins, Ph.D., at Ohev Shalom Congregation, 525 South Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles. According to a divorce decree found in the attic of Philadelphia's City Hall, Astor received a divorce on January 18, 1946. Withers is Astor's son by a later marriage. He learned about her marriage to Goodis only after her death in 1986 from a stroke. In 1950, Goodis returned to Philadelphia where he lived with his parents and his schizophrenic brother Herbert. At night, he prowled the underside of Philadelphia, hanging out in nightclubs and seedy bars, a milieu he depicted in his fiction. Cassidy's Girl (1951) sold over a million copies, and he continued to write for paperback publishers, notably Gold Medal. There was a renewed interest in his novels when Francois Truffaut filmed Down There (1956) as the acclaimed Shoot the Piano Player (1960). Goodis died at 11:30pm on January 7, 1967, at Albert Einstein Medical Center, Northern Division, not far from his home. He was 49. His death certificate lists ‘cerebral vascular accident,' meaning a stroke, as the cause of death. Days earlier, Goodis had been beaten while resisting a robbery. Some have attributed his death to his injuries. It is also said that he keeled over while shoveling snow. He was buried in Roosevelt Memorial Park, in Pennsylvania. In 1963, ABC television began airing the television show The Fugitive, the story of Richard Kimble, a doctor wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife. Kimble subsequently escapes and begins a long search for the ‘one-armed man', the person he believes to be the real killer. Goodis stated that The Fugitive was based on his novel Dark Passage. In 1965, he sued United Artists-TV and ABC for $500,000, alleging copyright infringement. His cousin's law firm, Goodis, Greenfield, Narin and Mann, represented him and several groups supported him, including the Author's League of America, the Dramatist's Guild, and the American Book Publishers Association. Coudert Brothers represented United Artists and ABC. During a deposition on December 9, 1966, Goodis stated that The Saturday Evening Post had serialized Dark Passage, a fact that would become critical to the case. One month later, Goodis was dead. The lawsuit continued to wind its way through the courts, however. The dispute did not so much concern whether the theme of Dark Passage had been used, but whether the book was in the public domain. In a victory for UA and ABC, the District Court held that Goodis had, in effect, ‘donated his work to the public domain' when he published it in The Saturday Evening Post without using a copyright notice that listed his name. The Goodis estate appealed. In 1970, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed the lower court's decision and remanded the case for trial. The decision is reported at Goodis v. United Artists Television, Inc., 425 F.2d 397 (2nd Cir. 1970). The court wrote, ‘We unanimously conclude that where a magazine has purchased the right of first publication under circumstances which show that the author has no intention to donate his work to the public, copyright notice in the magazine's name is sufficient to obtain a valid copyright on behalf of the beneficial owner, the author or proprietor.' (425 F.2d 398-399). By then, Goodis's main beneficiary, his brother Herbert, was also dead. So in 1972, the Goodis estate agreed that the case now had only ‘nuisance value' and accepted $12,000 to settle the matter. Despite the significant difference between the initial claim and the final monetary settlement, the case is still regarded as a landmark decision in intellectual property rights and copyright law. After his death, his work went out of print in the United States, but he remained a popular favorite in France. In 1987, Black Lizard began to reissue Goodis titles. In 2007, Hard Case Crime published a new edition of The Wounded and the Slain for the first time in more than 50 years. Also in 2007, Street of No Return and Nightfall were re-published by Millipede Press. His novel Down There was reprinted as part of American Noir of the 1950s, in the Library of America. In March 2012, the Library of America published a selection of Goodis's novels under the title, David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 50s. Goodis has influenced contemporary crime fiction writers, notably Duane Swierczynski, and Ken Bruen. A character in Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 film Made in U.S.A. was named after Goodis.

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The Blonde On the Street Corner by David Goodis. New York. 1997. Serpent's Tail. 1852424478. 250 pages. paperback. 

DESCRIPTION - She took a final drag at the cigarette, flipped it away, and said, I don't get this line of talk. It's way over my head...Maybe you're waiting for some dream girl to come along in a coach drawn by six white horses, and she'll pick you up and haul you away to the clouds, where it's all milk and honey and springtime all year around. Maybe that's what you're waiting for. That dream girl. Maybe, he murmurmed. And then he looked at the blonde. His smile was soft and friendly and he said, I guess that's why I can't start with you. I'm waiting for the dream girl. But the dream girl does not come. In the meantime Ralph must deal with the yearnings of everyday life and take what he is offered. Written in 1954, The Blonde on the Street Corner is full of the passions and desires that are the hallmarks of a David Goodis novel.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Loeb Goodis (March 2, 1917 - January 7, 1967) was an American writer of crime fiction, noted for his prolific output of short stories and novels epitomizing the noir fiction genre. A native of Philadelphia, Goodis alternately resided there and in New York City and Hollywood during his professional years. Yet, throughout his life he maintained a deep identification with the city of his birth, Philadelphia. Goodis cultivated the skid row neighborhoods of his home town, using what he observed to craft his hard-boiled sagas of lives gone wrong, realized in dark portrayals of a blighted urban landscape teeming with criminal life and human despair. ‘Despite his [university] education, a combination of ethnicity (Jewish) and temperament allowed him to empathize with outsiders: the working poor, the unjustly accused, fugitives, criminals.' Goodis was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the oldest child of William Goodis and Mollie Halpern Goodis. William Goodis was a Russian-Jewish Emigre born in 1882, who had arrived in America with his mother in 1890. David Goodis's mother Mollie Halpern was born in Pennsylvania also into a family of Russian-Jewish Emigres. In Philadelphia, Goodis's father co-owned a newspaper dealership and later went into the textile business as the William Goodis Company. A brother, Jerome, born in 1920, died of meningitis at age three. In 1922, another brother, Herbert, was born into the family. In high school Goodis was engaged in student affairs, editing the school newspaper, serving as student council president, and participating in athletics as a member of both the track and swim teams. He also had the distinction of being chosen valedictorian for the graduating class of 1935, delivering a speech entitled ‘Youth Looks at Peace'. As a college student, he continued and expanded on the interests he had pursued as a high school student, contributing to the student newspaper as both writer and cartoonist. It was during this period he purportedly attempted his hand at novel writing, a book titled Ignited. The novel was never published, and no copy of it has been discovered. Goodis later claimed: ‘The title was prophetic. Eventually I threw it into the furnace.' Goodis graduated from Temple University in 1938 with a degree in journalism. While working at an advertising agency, Goodis started writing his first novel, Retreat from Oblivion. After it was published by Dutton in 1939, Goodis moved to New York City, where he wrote under several pseudonyms for pulp magazines, including Battle Birds, Daredevil Aces, Dime Mystery, Horror Stories, Terror Tales and Western Tales, sometimes churning out 10,000 words a day. The first pulp story published under his own name appeared in Gangland Detective Stories (November, 1939), titled ‘Mistress of the White Slave King'. Over a five-and-a-half-year period, according to some sources, he produced five million words for the pulp magazines. While the quantity of his output far eclipses that of his predecessors Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, unlike theirs, the vast majority of his pulp stories have never been reprinted. During the 1940s, Goodis scripted for radio adventure serials, including Hop Harrigan, House of Mystery, and Superman. Novels he wrote during the early 1940s were rejected by publishers, but in 1942 he spent some time in Hollywood as one of the screenwriters on Universal's Destination Unknown. His big break came in 1946 when his novel Dark Passage was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, published by Julian Messner and filmed for Warner Bros. with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall heading the cast. Delmer Daves directed what is now regarded as a classic film noir, and a first edition of the 1946 hardcover is valued at more than $800. Arriving in Hollywood, Goodis signed a six-year contract with Warner Brothers, working on story treatments and scripts. In 1947, Goodis wrote the script for The Unfaithful, a remake of Somerset Maugham's The Letter. Some of his scripts were never produced, such as Of Missing Persons and an adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake. Working with director Delmer Daves, he wrote a screen treatment for a film, Up Till Now, which Daves described as ‘giving people a look at themselves and their [American] heritage'. This film too was never made but Goodis used some of its elements in his 1954 novel, The Blonde on the Street Corner. Goodis is also credited with writing the screenplay to The Burglar, a 1957 film noir directed by Paul Wendkos that was based on his 1953 novel published by Lion Books. It was the only solely authored screenplay to be produced by him. The film was written and directed by Philadelphians, as well as being shot in Philadelphia. Dan Duryea and Jayne Mansfield were cast in the lead roles, and The Burglar still stands as one of the greatest heist films ever made. It was re-made in 1971 by Henri Verneuil as the French-Italian film Le Casse, starring Omar Sharif. Until recently, it was generally believed that Goodis never married. His friend Harold ‘Dutch' Silver said Goodis never spoke of a wife, and no wife was mentioned in Goodis's obituary. Attorney correspondence also repeatedly stated that Goodis never married. However, research by Larry Withers and Louis Boxer has produced a marriage license for Goodis and Elaine Astor. It shows that they were married on October 7, 1943 by Rabbi Jacob Samuel Robins, Ph.D., at Ohev Shalom Congregation, 525 South Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles. According to a divorce decree found in the attic of Philadelphia's City Hall, Astor received a divorce on January 18, 1946. Withers is Astor's son by a later marriage. He learned about her marriage to Goodis only after her death in 1986 from a stroke. In 1950, Goodis returned to Philadelphia where he lived with his parents and his schizophrenic brother Herbert. At night, he prowled the underside of Philadelphia, hanging out in nightclubs and seedy bars, a milieu he depicted in his fiction. Cassidy's Girl (1951) sold over a million copies, and he continued to write for paperback publishers, notably Gold Medal. There was a renewed interest in his novels when Francois Truffaut filmed Down There (1956) as the acclaimed Shoot the Piano Player (1960). Goodis died at 11:30pm on January 7, 1967, at Albert Einstein Medical Center, Northern Division, not far from his home. He was 49. His death certificate lists ‘cerebral vascular accident,' meaning a stroke, as the cause of death. Days earlier, Goodis had been beaten while resisting a robbery. Some have attributed his death to his injuries. It is also said that he keeled over while shoveling snow. He was buried in Roosevelt Memorial Park, in Pennsylvania. In 1963, ABC television began airing the television show The Fugitive, the story of Richard Kimble, a doctor wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife. Kimble subsequently escapes and begins a long search for the ‘one-armed man', the person he believes to be the real killer. Goodis stated that The Fugitive was based on his novel Dark Passage. In 1965, he sued United Artists-TV and ABC for $500,000, alleging copyright infringement. His cousin's law firm, Goodis, Greenfield, Narin and Mann, represented him and several groups supported him, including the Author's League of America, the Dramatist's Guild, and the American Book Publishers Association. Coudert Brothers represented United Artists and ABC. During a deposition on December 9, 1966, Goodis stated that The Saturday Evening Post had serialized Dark Passage, a fact that would become critical to the case. One month later, Goodis was dead. The lawsuit continued to wind its way through the courts, however. The dispute did not so much concern whether the theme of Dark Passage had been used, but whether the book was in the public domain. In a victory for UA and ABC, the District Court held that Goodis had, in effect, ‘donated his work to the public domain' when he published it in The Saturday Evening Post without using a copyright notice that listed his name. The Goodis estate appealed. In 1970, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed the lower court's decision and remanded the case for trial. The decision is reported at Goodis v. United Artists Television, Inc., 425 F.2d 397 (2nd Cir. 1970). The court wrote, ‘We unanimously conclude that where a magazine has purchased the right of first publication under circumstances which show that the author has no intention to donate his work to the public, copyright notice in the magazine's name is sufficient to obtain a valid copyright on behalf of the beneficial owner, the author or proprietor.' (425 F.2d 398-399). By then, Goodis's main beneficiary, his brother Herbert, was also dead. So in 1972, the Goodis estate agreed that the case now had only ‘nuisance value' and accepted $12,000 to settle the matter. Despite the significant difference between the initial claim and the final monetary settlement, the case is still regarded as a landmark decision in intellectual property rights and copyright law. After his death, his work went out of print in the United States, but he remained a popular favorite in France. In 1987, Black Lizard began to reissue Goodis titles. In 2007, Hard Case Crime published a new edition of The Wounded and the Slain for the first time in more than 50 years. Also in 2007, Street of No Return and Nightfall were re-published by Millipede Press. His novel Down There was reprinted as part of American Noir of the 1950s, in the Library of America. In March 2012, the Library of America published a selection of Goodis's novels under the title, David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 50s. Goodis has influenced contemporary crime fiction writers, notably Duane Swierczynski, and Ken Bruen. A character in Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 film Made in U.S.A. was named after Goodis.

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Street of No Return by David Goodis. Lakewood. 2007. Millipede Press. 1933618227. Introduction by Robert Polito. 252 pages. paperback. Cover image by Jeff Hersch.  

DESCRIPTION - Once upon a time Whitey was a crooner with a million-dollar voice and a standing invitation from any woman who heard him use it. Until he had the bad luck to fall for Celia. And then nothing would ever be the same. In STREET OF NO RETURN David Goodis works the magic that made him one of the most distinctive voices in hard-boiled fiction, creating a claustrophobic universe in which wounded men and women collide with cataclysmic force. Special features of this edition - New introductory essay by Robert Polito; An extra short story, ‘Black Pudding'; New design with entirely reset text.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Loeb Goodis (March 2, 1917 - January 7, 1967) was an American writer of crime fiction, noted for his prolific output of short stories and novels epitomizing the noir fiction genre. A native of Philadelphia, Goodis alternately resided there and in New York City and Hollywood during his professional years. Yet, throughout his life he maintained a deep identification with the city of his birth, Philadelphia. Goodis cultivated the skid row neighborhoods of his home town, using what he observed to craft his hard-boiled sagas of lives gone wrong, realized in dark portrayals of a blighted urban landscape teeming with criminal life and human despair. ‘Despite his [university] education, a combination of ethnicity (Jewish) and temperament allowed him to empathize with outsiders: the working poor, the unjustly accused, fugitives, criminals.' Goodis was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the oldest child of William Goodis and Mollie Halpern Goodis. William Goodis was a Russian-Jewish Emigre born in 1882, who had arrived in America with his mother in 1890. David Goodis's mother Mollie Halpern was born in Pennsylvania also into a family of Russian-Jewish Emigres. In Philadelphia, Goodis's father co-owned a newspaper dealership and later went into the textile business as the William Goodis Company. A brother, Jerome, born in 1920, died of meningitis at age three. In 1922, another brother, Herbert, was born into the family. In high school Goodis was engaged in student affairs, editing the school newspaper, serving as student council president, and participating in athletics as a member of both the track and swim teams. He also had the distinction of being chosen valedictorian for the graduating class of 1935, delivering a speech entitled ‘Youth Looks at Peace'. As a college student, he continued and expanded on the interests he had pursued as a high school student, contributing to the student newspaper as both writer and cartoonist. It was during this period he purportedly attempted his hand at novel writing, a book titled Ignited. The novel was never published, and no copy of it has been discovered. Goodis later claimed: ‘The title was prophetic. Eventually I threw it into the furnace.' Goodis graduated from Temple University in 1938 with a degree in journalism. While working at an advertising agency, Goodis started writing his first novel, Retreat from Oblivion. After it was published by Dutton in 1939, Goodis moved to New York City, where he wrote under several pseudonyms for pulp magazines, including Battle Birds, Daredevil Aces, Dime Mystery, Horror Stories, Terror Tales and Western Tales, sometimes churning out 10,000 words a day. The first pulp story published under his own name appeared in Gangland Detective Stories (November, 1939), titled ‘Mistress of the White Slave King'. Over a five-and-a-half-year period, according to some sources, he produced five million words for the pulp magazines. While the quantity of his output far eclipses that of his predecessors Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, unlike theirs, the vast majority of his pulp stories have never been reprinted. During the 1940s, Goodis scripted for radio adventure serials, including Hop Harrigan, House of Mystery, and Superman. Novels he wrote during the early 1940s were rejected by publishers, but in 1942 he spent some time in Hollywood as one of the screenwriters on Universal's Destination Unknown. His big break came in 1946 when his novel Dark Passage was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, published by Julian Messner and filmed for Warner Bros. with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall heading the cast. Delmer Daves directed what is now regarded as a classic film noir, and a first edition of the 1946 hardcover is valued at more than $800. Arriving in Hollywood, Goodis signed a six-year contract with Warner Brothers, working on story treatments and scripts. In 1947, Goodis wrote the script for The Unfaithful, a remake of Somerset Maugham's The Letter. Some of his scripts were never produced, such as Of Missing Persons and an adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake. Working with director Delmer Daves, he wrote a screen treatment for a film, Up Till Now, which Daves described as ‘giving people a look at themselves and their [American] heritage'. This film too was never made but Goodis used some of its elements in his 1954 novel, The Blonde on the Street Corner. Goodis is also credited with writing the screenplay to The Burglar, a 1957 film noir directed by Paul Wendkos that was based on his 1953 novel published by Lion Books. It was the only solely authored screenplay to be produced by him. The film was written and directed by Philadelphians, as well as being shot in Philadelphia. Dan Duryea and Jayne Mansfield were cast in the lead roles, and The Burglar still stands as one of the greatest heist films ever made. It was re-made in 1971 by Henri Verneuil as the French-Italian film Le Casse, starring Omar Sharif. Until recently, it was generally believed that Goodis never married. His friend Harold ‘Dutch' Silver said Goodis never spoke of a wife, and no wife was mentioned in Goodis's obituary. Attorney correspondence also repeatedly stated that Goodis never married. However, research by Larry Withers and Louis Boxer has produced a marriage license for Goodis and Elaine Astor. It shows that they were married on October 7, 1943 by Rabbi Jacob Samuel Robins, Ph.D., at Ohev Shalom Congregation, 525 South Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles. According to a divorce decree found in the attic of Philadelphia's City Hall, Astor received a divorce on January 18, 1946. Withers is Astor's son by a later marriage. He learned about her marriage to Goodis only after her death in 1986 from a stroke. In 1950, Goodis returned to Philadelphia where he lived with his parents and his schizophrenic brother Herbert. At night, he prowled the underside of Philadelphia, hanging out in nightclubs and seedy bars, a milieu he depicted in his fiction. Cassidy's Girl (1951) sold over a million copies, and he continued to write for paperback publishers, notably Gold Medal. There was a renewed interest in his novels when Francois Truffaut filmed Down There (1956) as the acclaimed Shoot the Piano Player (1960). Goodis died at 11:30pm on January 7, 1967, at Albert Einstein Medical Center, Northern Division, not far from his home. He was 49. His death certificate lists ‘cerebral vascular accident,' meaning a stroke, as the cause of death. Days earlier, Goodis had been beaten while resisting a robbery. Some have attributed his death to his injuries. It is also said that he keeled over while shoveling snow. He was buried in Roosevelt Memorial Park, in Pennsylvania. In 1963, ABC television began airing the television show The Fugitive, the story of Richard Kimble, a doctor wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife. Kimble subsequently escapes and begins a long search for the ‘one-armed man', the person he believes to be the real killer. Goodis stated that The Fugitive was based on his novel Dark Passage. In 1965, he sued United Artists-TV and ABC for $500,000, alleging copyright infringement. His cousin's law firm, Goodis, Greenfield, Narin and Mann, represented him and several groups supported him, including the Author's League of America, the Dramatist's Guild, and the American Book Publishers Association. Coudert Brothers represented United Artists and ABC. During a deposition on December 9, 1966, Goodis stated that The Saturday Evening Post had serialized Dark Passage, a fact that would become critical to the case. One month later, Goodis was dead. The lawsuit continued to wind its way through the courts, however. The dispute did not so much concern whether the theme of Dark Passage had been used, but whether the book was in the public domain. In a victory for UA and ABC, the District Court held that Goodis had, in effect, ‘donated his work to the public domain' when he published it in The Saturday Evening Post without using a copyright notice that listed his name. The Goodis estate appealed. In 1970, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed the lower court's decision and remanded the case for trial. The decision is reported at Goodis v. United Artists Television, Inc., 425 F.2d 397 (2nd Cir. 1970). The court wrote, ‘We unanimously conclude that where a magazine has purchased the right of first publication under circumstances which show that the author has no intention to donate his work to the public, copyright notice in the magazine's name is sufficient to obtain a valid copyright on behalf of the beneficial owner, the author or proprietor.' (425 F.2d 398-399). By then, Goodis's main beneficiary, his brother Herbert, was also dead. So in 1972, the Goodis estate agreed that the case now had only ‘nuisance value' and accepted $12,000 to settle the matter. Despite the significant difference between the initial claim and the final monetary settlement, the case is still regarded as a landmark decision in intellectual property rights and copyright law. After his death, his work went out of print in the United States, but he remained a popular favorite in France. In 1987, Black Lizard began to reissue Goodis titles. In 2007, Hard Case Crime published a new edition of The Wounded and the Slain for the first time in more than 50 years. Also in 2007, Street of No Return and Nightfall were re-published by Millipede Press. His novel Down There was reprinted as part of American Noir of the 1950s, in the Library of America. In March 2012, the Library of America published a selection of Goodis's novels under the title, David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 50s. Goodis has influenced contemporary crime fiction writers, notably Duane Swierczynski, and Ken Bruen. A character in Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 film Made in U.S.A. was named after Goodis.

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Nightfall by David Goodis. Berkeley. 1987. Black Lizard Books. 0887390293. Introduction by Geoffrey O’Brien. 160 pages. paperback.  

DESCRIPTION - An almost perfect book, spare, balanced, and inexplicably moving.' - Geoffrey O'Brien Jim Vanning has an identity crisis. Is he an innocent artist who just happens to have some very dangerous people interested in him? Or is he a killer on the lam from his last murder - with a satchel worth over $300,000 in tow? Relentlessly focused, Nightfall may be David Goodis' most accomplished novel. It is a fiendishly constructed maze, filled with unpredictable pitfalls and human predators whose authenticity only makes them more terrifying. David Goodis (1917-1967), a former pulp, radio, and Hollywood script writer, is now recognized as a leading author of crime fiction. Besides sojourns in New York City and Hollywood, he lived primarily in Philadelphia.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Loeb Goodis (March 2, 1917 - January 7, 1967) was an American writer of crime fiction, noted for his prolific output of short stories and novels epitomizing the noir fiction genre. A native of Philadelphia, Goodis alternately resided there and in New York City and Hollywood during his professional years. Yet, throughout his life he maintained a deep identification with the city of his birth, Philadelphia. Goodis cultivated the skid row neighborhoods of his home town, using what he observed to craft his hard-boiled sagas of lives gone wrong, realized in dark portrayals of a blighted urban landscape teeming with criminal life and human despair. ‘Despite his [university] education, a combination of ethnicity (Jewish) and temperament allowed him to empathize with outsiders: the working poor, the unjustly accused, fugitives, criminals.' Goodis was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the oldest child of William Goodis and Mollie Halpern Goodis. William Goodis was a Russian-Jewish Emigre born in 1882, who had arrived in America with his mother in 1890. David Goodis's mother Mollie Halpern was born in Pennsylvania also into a family of Russian-Jewish Emigres. In Philadelphia, Goodis's father co-owned a newspaper dealership and later went into the textile business as the William Goodis Company. A brother, Jerome, born in 1920, died of meningitis at age three. In 1922, another brother, Herbert, was born into the family. In high school Goodis was engaged in student affairs, editing the school newspaper, serving as student council president, and participating in athletics as a member of both the track and swim teams. He also had the distinction of being chosen valedictorian for the graduating class of 1935, delivering a speech entitled ‘Youth Looks at Peace'. As a college student, he continued and expanded on the interests he had pursued as a high school student, contributing to the student newspaper as both writer and cartoonist. It was during this period he purportedly attempted his hand at novel writing, a book titled Ignited. The novel was never published, and no copy of it has been discovered. Goodis later claimed: ‘The title was prophetic. Eventually I threw it into the furnace.' Goodis graduated from Temple University in 1938 with a degree in journalism. While working at an advertising agency, Goodis started writing his first novel, Retreat from Oblivion. After it was published by Dutton in 1939, Goodis moved to New York City, where he wrote under several pseudonyms for pulp magazines, including Battle Birds, Daredevil Aces, Dime Mystery, Horror Stories, Terror Tales and Western Tales, sometimes churning out 10,000 words a day. The first pulp story published under his own name appeared in Gangland Detective Stories (November, 1939), titled ‘Mistress of the White Slave King'. Over a five-and-a-half-year period, according to some sources, he produced five million words for the pulp magazines. While the quantity of his output far eclipses that of his predecessors Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, unlike theirs, the vast majority of his pulp stories have never been reprinted. During the 1940s, Goodis scripted for radio adventure serials, including Hop Harrigan, House of Mystery, and Superman. Novels he wrote during the early 1940s were rejected by publishers, but in 1942 he spent some time in Hollywood as one of the screenwriters on Universal's Destination Unknown. His big break came in 1946 when his novel Dark Passage was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, published by Julian Messner and filmed for Warner Bros. with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall heading the cast. Delmer Daves directed what is now regarded as a classic film noir, and a first edition of the 1946 hardcover is valued at more than $800. Arriving in Hollywood, Goodis signed a six-year contract with Warner Brothers, working on story treatments and scripts. In 1947, Goodis wrote the script for The Unfaithful, a remake of Somerset Maugham's The Letter. Some of his scripts were never produced, such as Of Missing Persons and an adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake. Working with director Delmer Daves, he wrote a screen treatment for a film, Up Till Now, which Daves described as ‘giving people a look at themselves and their [American] heritage'. This film too was never made but Goodis used some of its elements in his 1954 novel, The Blonde on the Street Corner. Goodis is also credited with writing the screenplay to The Burglar, a 1957 film noir directed by Paul Wendkos that was based on his 1953 novel published by Lion Books. It was the only solely authored screenplay to be produced by him. The film was written and directed by Philadelphians, as well as being shot in Philadelphia. Dan Duryea and Jayne Mansfield were cast in the lead roles, and The Burglar still stands as one of the greatest heist films ever made. It was re-made in 1971 by Henri Verneuil as the French-Italian film Le Casse, starring Omar Sharif. Until recently, it was generally believed that Goodis never married. His friend Harold ‘Dutch' Silver said Goodis never spoke of a wife, and no wife was mentioned in Goodis's obituary. Attorney correspondence also repeatedly stated that Goodis never married. However, research by Larry Withers and Louis Boxer has produced a marriage license for Goodis and Elaine Astor. It shows that they were married on October 7, 1943 by Rabbi Jacob Samuel Robins, Ph.D., at Ohev Shalom Congregation, 525 South Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles. According to a divorce decree found in the attic of Philadelphia's City Hall, Astor received a divorce on January 18, 1946. Withers is Astor's son by a later marriage. He learned about her marriage to Goodis only after her death in 1986 from a stroke. In 1950, Goodis returned to Philadelphia where he lived with his parents and his schizophrenic brother Herbert. At night, he prowled the underside of Philadelphia, hanging out in nightclubs and seedy bars, a milieu he depicted in his fiction. Cassidy's Girl (1951) sold over a million copies, and he continued to write for paperback publishers, notably Gold Medal. There was a renewed interest in his novels when Francois Truffaut filmed Down There (1956) as the acclaimed Shoot the Piano Player (1960). Goodis died at 11:30pm on January 7, 1967, at Albert Einstein Medical Center, Northern Division, not far from his home. He was 49. His death certificate lists ‘cerebral vascular accident,' meaning a stroke, as the cause of death. Days earlier, Goodis had been beaten while resisting a robbery. Some have attributed his death to his injuries. It is also said that he keeled over while shoveling snow. He was buried in Roosevelt Memorial Park, in Pennsylvania. In 1963, ABC television began airing the television show The Fugitive, the story of Richard Kimble, a doctor wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife. Kimble subsequently escapes and begins a long search for the ‘one-armed man', the person he believes to be the real killer. Goodis stated that The Fugitive was based on his novel Dark Passage. In 1965, he sued United Artists-TV and ABC for $500,000, alleging copyright infringement. His cousin's law firm, Goodis, Greenfield, Narin and Mann, represented him and several groups supported him, including the Author's League of America, the Dramatist's Guild, and the American Book Publishers Association. Coudert Brothers represented United Artists and ABC. During a deposition on December 9, 1966, Goodis stated that The Saturday Evening Post had serialized Dark Passage, a fact that would become critical to the case. One month later, Goodis was dead. The lawsuit continued to wind its way through the courts, however. The dispute did not so much concern whether the theme of Dark Passage had been used, but whether the book was in the public domain. In a victory for UA and ABC, the District Court held that Goodis had, in effect, ‘donated his work to the public domain' when he published it in The Saturday Evening Post without using a copyright notice that listed his name. The Goodis estate appealed. In 1970, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed the lower court's decision and remanded the case for trial. The decision is reported at Goodis v. United Artists Television, Inc., 425 F.2d 397 (2nd Cir. 1970). The court wrote, ‘We unanimously conclude that where a magazine has purchased the right of first publication under circumstances which show that the author has no intention to donate his work to the public, copyright notice in the magazine's name is sufficient to obtain a valid copyright on behalf of the beneficial owner, the author or proprietor.' (425 F.2d 398-399). By then, Goodis's main beneficiary, his brother Herbert, was also dead. So in 1972, the Goodis estate agreed that the case now had only ‘nuisance value' and accepted $12,000 to settle the matter. Despite the significant difference between the initial claim and the final monetary settlement, the case is still regarded as a landmark decision in intellectual property rights and copyright law. After his death, his work went out of print in the United States, but he remained a popular favorite in France. In 1987, Black Lizard began to reissue Goodis titles. In 2007, Hard Case Crime published a new edition of The Wounded and the Slain for the first time in more than 50 years. Also in 2007, Street of No Return and Nightfall were re-published by Millipede Press. His novel Down There was reprinted as part of American Noir of the 1950s, in the Library of America. In March 2012, the Library of America published a selection of Goodis's novels under the title, David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 50s. Goodis has influenced contemporary crime fiction writers, notably Duane Swierczynski, and Ken Bruen. A character in Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 film Made in U.S.A. was named after Goodis.

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Dark Passage by David Goodis. London. 1947. Heinemann.  207 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - DARK PASSAGE is a novel by David Goodis which was the basis for the 1947 film noir of the same name. In DARK PASSAGE, Vincent Parry, wrongly convicted of murdering his wife, escapes from prison and is taken in by Irene Jansen, an artist with an interest in his case. Helped by a friendly cabbie, Parry gets a new face from a plastic surgeon, thereby enabling him to dodge the authorities and find his wife's real killer. He has difficulty staying hidden, in part because Madge Rapf, the spiteful woman whose testimony sent him up to prison, and who has an unhealthy interest in Irene, keeps stopping by. DARK PASSAGE was adapted for film in 1947, with a screenplay by Delmer Daves, who also directed. It reunited Bogart and Bacall onscreen, and co-starred Agnes Moorehead and Bruce Bennett.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Loeb Goodis (March 2, 1917 - January 7, 1967) was an American writer of crime fiction, noted for his prolific output of short stories and novels epitomizing the noir fiction genre. A native of Philadelphia, Goodis alternately resided there and in New York City and Hollywood during his professional years. Yet, throughout his life he maintained a deep identification with the city of his birth, Philadelphia. Goodis cultivated the skid row neighborhoods of his home town, using what he observed to craft his hard-boiled sagas of lives gone wrong, realized in dark portrayals of a blighted urban landscape teeming with criminal life and human despair. ‘Despite his [university] education, a combination of ethnicity (Jewish) and temperament allowed him to empathize with outsiders: the working poor, the unjustly accused, fugitives, criminals.' Goodis was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the oldest child of William Goodis and Mollie Halpern Goodis. William Goodis was a Russian-Jewish Emigre born in 1882, who had arrived in America with his mother in 1890. David Goodis's mother Mollie Halpern was born in Pennsylvania also into a family of Russian-Jewish Emigres. In Philadelphia, Goodis's father co-owned a newspaper dealership and later went into the textile business as the William Goodis Company. A brother, Jerome, born in 1920, died of meningitis at age three. In 1922, another brother, Herbert, was born into the family. In high school Goodis was engaged in student affairs, editing the school newspaper, serving as student council president, and participating in athletics as a member of both the track and swim teams. He also had the distinction of being chosen valedictorian for the graduating class of 1935, delivering a speech entitled ‘Youth Looks at Peace'. As a college student, he continued and expanded on the interests he had pursued as a high school student, contributing to the student newspaper as both writer and cartoonist. It was during this period he purportedly attempted his hand at novel writing, a book titled Ignited. The novel was never published, and no copy of it has been discovered. Goodis later claimed: ‘The title was prophetic. Eventually I threw it into the furnace.' Goodis graduated from Temple University in 1938 with a degree in journalism. While working at an advertising agency, Goodis started writing his first novel, Retreat from Oblivion. After it was published by Dutton in 1939, Goodis moved to New York City, where he wrote under several pseudonyms for pulp magazines, including Battle Birds, Daredevil Aces, Dime Mystery, Horror Stories, Terror Tales and Western Tales, sometimes churning out 10,000 words a day. The first pulp story published under his own name appeared in Gangland Detective Stories (November, 1939), titled ‘Mistress of the White Slave King'. Over a five-and-a-half-year period, according to some sources, he produced five million words for the pulp magazines. While the quantity of his output far eclipses that of his predecessors Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, unlike theirs, the vast majority of his pulp stories have never been reprinted. During the 1940s, Goodis scripted for radio adventure serials, including Hop Harrigan, House of Mystery, and Superman. Novels he wrote during the early 1940s were rejected by publishers, but in 1942 he spent some time in Hollywood as one of the screenwriters on Universal's Destination Unknown. His big break came in 1946 when his novel Dark Passage was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, published by Julian Messner and filmed for Warner Bros. with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall heading the cast. Delmer Daves directed what is now regarded as a classic film noir, and a first edition of the 1946 hardcover is valued at more than $800. Arriving in Hollywood, Goodis signed a six-year contract with Warner Brothers, working on story treatments and scripts. In 1947, Goodis wrote the script for The Unfaithful, a remake of Somerset Maugham's The Letter. Some of his scripts were never produced, such as Of Missing Persons and an adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake. Working with director Delmer Daves, he wrote a screen treatment for a film, Up Till Now, which Daves described as ‘giving people a look at themselves and their [American] heritage'. This film too was never made but Goodis used some of its elements in his 1954 novel, The Blonde on the Street Corner. Goodis is also credited with writing the screenplay to The Burglar, a 1957 film noir directed by Paul Wendkos that was based on his 1953 novel published by Lion Books. It was the only solely authored screenplay to be produced by him. The film was written and directed by Philadelphians, as well as being shot in Philadelphia. Dan Duryea and Jayne Mansfield were cast in the lead roles, and The Burglar still stands as one of the greatest heist films ever made. It was re-made in 1971 by Henri Verneuil as the French-Italian film Le Casse, starring Omar Sharif. Until recently, it was generally believed that Goodis never married. His friend Harold ‘Dutch' Silver said Goodis never spoke of a wife, and no wife was mentioned in Goodis's obituary. Attorney correspondence also repeatedly stated that Goodis never married. However, research by Larry Withers and Louis Boxer has produced a marriage license for Goodis and Elaine Astor. It shows that they were married on October 7, 1943 by Rabbi Jacob Samuel Robins, Ph.D., at Ohev Shalom Congregation, 525 South Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles. According to a divorce decree found in the attic of Philadelphia's City Hall, Astor received a divorce on January 18, 1946. Withers is Astor's son by a later marriage. He learned about her marriage to Goodis only after her death in 1986 from a stroke. In 1950, Goodis returned to Philadelphia where he lived with his parents and his schizophrenic brother Herbert. At night, he prowled the underside of Philadelphia, hanging out in nightclubs and seedy bars, a milieu he depicted in his fiction. Cassidy's Girl (1951) sold over a million copies, and he continued to write for paperback publishers, notably Gold Medal. There was a renewed interest in his novels when Francois Truffaut filmed Down There (1956) as the acclaimed Shoot the Piano Player (1960). Goodis died at 11:30pm on January 7, 1967, at Albert Einstein Medical Center, Northern Division, not far from his home. He was 49. His death certificate lists ‘cerebral vascular accident,' meaning a stroke, as the cause of death. Days earlier, Goodis had been beaten while resisting a robbery. Some have attributed his death to his injuries. It is also said that he keeled over while shoveling snow. He was buried in Roosevelt Memorial Park, in Pennsylvania. In 1963, ABC television began airing the television show The Fugitive, the story of Richard Kimble, a doctor wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife. Kimble subsequently escapes and begins a long search for the ‘one-armed man', the person he believes to be the real killer. Goodis stated that The Fugitive was based on his novel Dark Passage. In 1965, he sued United Artists-TV and ABC for $500,000, alleging copyright infringement. His cousin's law firm, Goodis, Greenfield, Narin and Mann, represented him and several groups supported him, including the Author's League of America, the Dramatist's Guild, and the American Book Publishers Association. Coudert Brothers represented United Artists and ABC. During a deposition on December 9, 1966, Goodis stated that The Saturday Evening Post had serialized Dark Passage, a fact that would become critical to the case. One month later, Goodis was dead. The lawsuit continued to wind its way through the courts, however. The dispute did not so much concern whether the theme of Dark Passage had been used, but whether the book was in the public domain. In a victory for UA and ABC, the District Court held that Goodis had, in effect, ‘donated his work to the public domain' when he published it in The Saturday Evening Post without using a copyright notice that listed his name. The Goodis estate appealed. In 1970, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed the lower court's decision and remanded the case for trial. The decision is reported at Goodis v. United Artists Television, Inc., 425 F.2d 397 (2nd Cir. 1970). The court wrote, ‘We unanimously conclude that where a magazine has purchased the right of first publication under circumstances which show that the author has no intention to donate his work to the public, copyright notice in the magazine's name is sufficient to obtain a valid copyright on behalf of the beneficial owner, the author or proprietor.' (425 F.2d 398-399). By then, Goodis's main beneficiary, his brother Herbert, was also dead. So in 1972, the Goodis estate agreed that the case now had only ‘nuisance value' and accepted $12,000 to settle the matter. Despite the significant difference between the initial claim and the final monetary settlement, the case is still regarded as a landmark decision in intellectual property rights and copyright law. After his death, his work went out of print in the United States, but he remained a popular favorite in France. In 1987, Black Lizard began to reissue Goodis titles. In 2007, Hard Case Crime published a new edition of The Wounded and the Slain for the first time in more than 50 years. Also in 2007, Street of No Return and Nightfall were re-published by Millipede Press. His novel Down There was reprinted as part of American Noir of the 1950s, in the Library of America. In March 2012, the Library of America published a selection of Goodis's novels under the title, David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 50s. Goodis has influenced contemporary crime fiction writers, notably Duane Swierczynski, and Ken Bruen. A character in Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 film Made in U.S.A. was named after Goodis.

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Night Squad by David Goodis. New York. 1961. Fawcett. Paperback Original. 191 pages. paperback. s1083.  

DESCRIPTION - When a cop goes bad, he can always become a crook. When a crook goes bad - that's when the Night Squad wants him. David Goodis's irresistibly readable study of corruption is a masterly portrait of a man clawing his way back from betrayal - and betraying countless others along the way.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Loeb Goodis (March 2, 1917 - January 7, 1967) was an American writer of crime fiction, noted for his prolific output of short stories and novels epitomizing the noir fiction genre. A native of Philadelphia, Goodis alternately resided there and in New York City and Hollywood during his professional years. Yet, throughout his life he maintained a deep identification with the city of his birth, Philadelphia. Goodis cultivated the skid row neighborhoods of his home town, using what he observed to craft his hard-boiled sagas of lives gone wrong, realized in dark portrayals of a blighted urban landscape teeming with criminal life and human despair. ‘Despite his [university] education, a combination of ethnicity (Jewish) and temperament allowed him to empathize with outsiders: the working poor, the unjustly accused, fugitives, criminals.' Goodis was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the oldest child of William Goodis and Mollie Halpern Goodis. William Goodis was a Russian-Jewish Emigre born in 1882, who had arrived in America with his mother in 1890. David Goodis's mother Mollie Halpern was born in Pennsylvania also into a family of Russian-Jewish Emigres. In Philadelphia, Goodis's father co-owned a newspaper dealership and later went into the textile business as the William Goodis Company. A brother, Jerome, born in 1920, died of meningitis at age three. In 1922, another brother, Herbert, was born into the family. In high school Goodis was engaged in student affairs, editing the school newspaper, serving as student council president, and participating in athletics as a member of both the track and swim teams. He also had the distinction of being chosen valedictorian for the graduating class of 1935, delivering a speech entitled ‘Youth Looks at Peace'. As a college student, he continued and expanded on the interests he had pursued as a high school student, contributing to the student newspaper as both writer and cartoonist. It was during this period he purportedly attempted his hand at novel writing, a book titled Ignited. The novel was never published, and no copy of it has been discovered. Goodis later claimed: ‘The title was prophetic. Eventually I threw it into the furnace.' Goodis graduated from Temple University in 1938 with a degree in journalism. While working at an advertising agency, Goodis started writing his first novel, Retreat from Oblivion. After it was published by Dutton in 1939, Goodis moved to New York City, where he wrote under several pseudonyms for pulp magazines, including Battle Birds, Daredevil Aces, Dime Mystery, Horror Stories, Terror Tales and Western Tales, sometimes churning out 10,000 words a day. The first pulp story published under his own name appeared in Gangland Detective Stories (November, 1939), titled ‘Mistress of the White Slave King'. Over a five-and-a-half-year period, according to some sources, he produced five million words for the pulp magazines. While the quantity of his output far eclipses that of his predecessors Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, unlike theirs, the vast majority of his pulp stories have never been reprinted. During the 1940s, Goodis scripted for radio adventure serials, including Hop Harrigan, House of Mystery, and Superman. Novels he wrote during the early 1940s were rejected by publishers, but in 1942 he spent some time in Hollywood as one of the screenwriters on Universal's Destination Unknown. His big break came in 1946 when his novel Dark Passage was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, published by Julian Messner and filmed for Warner Bros. with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall heading the cast. Delmer Daves directed what is now regarded as a classic film noir, and a first edition of the 1946 hardcover is valued at more than $800. Arriving in Hollywood, Goodis signed a six-year contract with Warner Brothers, working on story treatments and scripts. In 1947, Goodis wrote the script for The Unfaithful, a remake of Somerset Maugham's The Letter. Some of his scripts were never produced, such as Of Missing Persons and an adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake. Working with director Delmer Daves, he wrote a screen treatment for a film, Up Till Now, which Daves described as ‘giving people a look at themselves and their [American] heritage'. This film too was never made but Goodis used some of its elements in his 1954 novel, The Blonde on the Street Corner. Goodis is also credited with writing the screenplay to The Burglar, a 1957 film noir directed by Paul Wendkos that was based on his 1953 novel published by Lion Books. It was the only solely authored screenplay to be produced by him. The film was written and directed by Philadelphians, as well as being shot in Philadelphia. Dan Duryea and Jayne Mansfield were cast in the lead roles, and The Burglar still stands as one of the greatest heist films ever made. It was re-made in 1971 by Henri Verneuil as the French-Italian film Le Casse, starring Omar Sharif. Until recently, it was generally believed that Goodis never married. His friend Harold ‘Dutch' Silver said Goodis never spoke of a wife, and no wife was mentioned in Goodis's obituary. Attorney correspondence also repeatedly stated that Goodis never married. However, research by Larry Withers and Louis Boxer has produced a marriage license for Goodis and Elaine Astor. It shows that they were married on October 7, 1943 by Rabbi Jacob Samuel Robins, Ph.D., at Ohev Shalom Congregation, 525 South Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles. According to a divorce decree found in the attic of Philadelphia's City Hall, Astor received a divorce on January 18, 1946. Withers is Astor's son by a later marriage. He learned about her marriage to Goodis only after her death in 1986 from a stroke. In 1950, Goodis returned to Philadelphia where he lived with his parents and his schizophrenic brother Herbert. At night, he prowled the underside of Philadelphia, hanging out in nightclubs and seedy bars, a milieu he depicted in his fiction. Cassidy's Girl (1951) sold over a million copies, and he continued to write for paperback publishers, notably Gold Medal. There was a renewed interest in his novels when Francois Truffaut filmed Down There (1956) as the acclaimed Shoot the Piano Player (1960). Goodis died at 11:30pm on January 7, 1967, at Albert Einstein Medical Center, Northern Division, not far from his home. He was 49. His death certificate lists ‘cerebral vascular accident,' meaning a stroke, as the cause of death. Days earlier, Goodis had been beaten while resisting a robbery. Some have attributed his death to his injuries. It is also said that he keeled over while shoveling snow. He was buried in Roosevelt Memorial Park, in Pennsylvania. In 1963, ABC television began airing the television show The Fugitive, the story of Richard Kimble, a doctor wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife. Kimble subsequently escapes and begins a long search for the ‘one-armed man', the person he believes to be the real killer. Goodis stated that The Fugitive was based on his novel Dark Passage. In 1965, he sued United Artists-TV and ABC for $500,000, alleging copyright infringement. His cousin's law firm, Goodis, Greenfield, Narin and Mann, represented him and several groups supported him, including the Author's League of America, the Dramatist's Guild, and the American Book Publishers Association. Coudert Brothers represented United Artists and ABC. During a deposition on December 9, 1966, Goodis stated that The Saturday Evening Post had serialized Dark Passage, a fact that would become critical to the case. One month later, Goodis was dead. The lawsuit continued to wind its way through the courts, however. The dispute did not so much concern whether the theme of Dark Passage had been used, but whether the book was in the public domain. In a victory for UA and ABC, the District Court held that Goodis had, in effect, ‘donated his work to the public domain' when he published it in The Saturday Evening Post without using a copyright notice that listed his name. The Goodis estate appealed. In 1970, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed the lower court's decision and remanded the case for trial. The decision is reported at Goodis v. United Artists Television, Inc., 425 F.2d 397 (2nd Cir. 1970). The court wrote, ‘We unanimously conclude that where a magazine has purchased the right of first publication under circumstances which show that the author has no intention to donate his work to the public, copyright notice in the magazine's name is sufficient to obtain a valid copyright on behalf of the beneficial owner, the author or proprietor.' (425 F.2d 398-399). By then, Goodis's main beneficiary, his brother Herbert, was also dead. So in 1972, the Goodis estate agreed that the case now had only ‘nuisance value' and accepted $12,000 to settle the matter. Despite the significant difference between the initial claim and the final monetary settlement, the case is still regarded as a landmark decision in intellectual property rights and copyright law. After his death, his work went out of print in the United States, but he remained a popular favorite in France. In 1987, Black Lizard began to reissue Goodis titles. In 2007, Hard Case Crime published a new edition of The Wounded and the Slain for the first time in more than 50 years. Also in 2007, Street of No Return and Nightfall were re-published by Millipede Press. His novel Down There was reprinted as part of American Noir of the 1950s, in the Library of America. In March 2012, the Library of America published a selection of Goodis's novels under the title, David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 50s. Goodis has influenced contemporary crime fiction writers, notably Duane Swierczynski, and Ken Bruen. A character in Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 film Made in U.S.A. was named after Goodis.

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Cassidy's Girl by David Goodis. New York. 1951. Fawcett/Gold Medal. Paperback Original. 173 pages. paperback.

DESCRIPTION - Mildred Cassidy was a lusty woman who knew what she wanted - and how she wanted it. Huge, redheaded Cassidy belonged to her. No one else could have him. They fought, they parted, they tried new loves, then met and fought and parted again. But through despair and anger, through violent, tempestuous love, and hate as deep as love, they had to come back to where they belonged - to each other. In this powerful, salty, elemental novel of the waterfront, David Goodis, author of such bestsellers as DARK PASSAGE, NIGHTFALL, BEHOLD THIS WOMAN and OF MISSING PERSON, comes to Gold Medal with his finest work.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Loeb Goodis (March 2, 1917 - January 7, 1967) was an American writer of crime fiction, noted for his prolific output of short stories and novels epitomizing the noir fiction genre. A native of Philadelphia, Goodis alternately resided there and in New York City and Hollywood during his professional years. Yet, throughout his life he maintained a deep identification with the city of his birth, Philadelphia. Goodis cultivated the skid row neighborhoods of his home town, using what he observed to craft his hard-boiled sagas of lives gone wrong, realized in dark portrayals of a blighted urban landscape teeming with criminal life and human despair. ‘Despite his [university] education, a combination of ethnicity (Jewish) and temperament allowed him to empathize with outsiders: the working poor, the unjustly accused, fugitives, criminals.' Goodis was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the oldest child of William Goodis and Mollie Halpern Goodis. William Goodis was a Russian-Jewish Emigre born in 1882, who had arrived in America with his mother in 1890. David Goodis's mother Mollie Halpern was born in Pennsylvania also into a family of Russian-Jewish Emigres. In Philadelphia, Goodis's father co-owned a newspaper dealership and later went into the textile business as the William Goodis Company. A brother, Jerome, born in 1920, died of meningitis at age three. In 1922, another brother, Herbert, was born into the family. In high school Goodis was engaged in student affairs, editing the school newspaper, serving as student council president, and participating in athletics as a member of both the track and swim teams. He also had the distinction of being chosen valedictorian for the graduating class of 1935, delivering a speech entitled ‘Youth Looks at Peace'. As a college student, he continued and expanded on the interests he had pursued as a high school student, contributing to the student newspaper as both writer and cartoonist. It was during this period he purportedly attempted his hand at novel writing, a book titled Ignited. The novel was never published, and no copy of it has been discovered. Goodis later claimed: ‘The title was prophetic. Eventually I threw it into the furnace.' Goodis graduated from Temple University in 1938 with a degree in journalism. While working at an advertising agency, Goodis started writing his first novel, Retreat from Oblivion. After it was published by Dutton in 1939, Goodis moved to New York City, where he wrote under several pseudonyms for pulp magazines, including Battle Birds, Daredevil Aces, Dime Mystery, Horror Stories, Terror Tales and Western Tales, sometimes churning out 10,000 words a day. The first pulp story published under his own name appeared in Gangland Detective Stories (November, 1939), titled ‘Mistress of the White Slave King'. Over a five-and-a-half-year period, according to some sources, he produced five million words for the pulp magazines. While the quantity of his output far eclipses that of his predecessors Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, unlike theirs, the vast majority of his pulp stories have never been reprinted. During the 1940s, Goodis scripted for radio adventure serials, including Hop Harrigan, House of Mystery, and Superman. Novels he wrote during the early 1940s were rejected by publishers, but in 1942 he spent some time in Hollywood as one of the screenwriters on Universal's Destination Unknown. His big break came in 1946 when his novel Dark Passage was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, published by Julian Messner and filmed for Warner Bros. with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall heading the cast. Delmer Daves directed what is now regarded as a classic film noir, and a first edition of the 1946 hardcover is valued at more than $800. Arriving in Hollywood, Goodis signed a six-year contract with Warner Brothers, working on story treatments and scripts. In 1947, Goodis wrote the script for The Unfaithful, a remake of Somerset Maugham's The Letter. Some of his scripts were never produced, such as Of Missing Persons and an adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake. Working with director Delmer Daves, he wrote a screen treatment for a film, Up Till Now, which Daves described as ‘giving people a look at themselves and their [American] heritage'. This film too was never made but Goodis used some of its elements in his 1954 novel, The Blonde on the Street Corner. Goodis is also credited with writing the screenplay to The Burglar, a 1957 film noir directed by Paul Wendkos that was based on his 1953 novel published by Lion Books. It was the only solely authored screenplay to be produced by him. The film was written and directed by Philadelphians, as well as being shot in Philadelphia. Dan Duryea and Jayne Mansfield were cast in the lead roles, and The Burglar still stands as one of the greatest heist films ever made. It was re-made in 1971 by Henri Verneuil as the French-Italian film Le Casse, starring Omar Sharif. Until recently, it was generally believed that Goodis never married. His friend Harold ‘Dutch' Silver said Goodis never spoke of a wife, and no wife was mentioned in Goodis's obituary. Attorney correspondence also repeatedly stated that Goodis never married. However, research by Larry Withers and Louis Boxer has produced a marriage license for Goodis and Elaine Astor. It shows that they were married on October 7, 1943 by Rabbi Jacob Samuel Robins, Ph.D., at Ohev Shalom Congregation, 525 South Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles. According to a divorce decree found in the attic of Philadelphia's City Hall, Astor received a divorce on January 18, 1946. Withers is Astor's son by a later marriage. He learned about her marriage to Goodis only after her death in 1986 from a stroke. In 1950, Goodis returned to Philadelphia where he lived with his parents and his schizophrenic brother Herbert. At night, he prowled the underside of Philadelphia, hanging out in nightclubs and seedy bars, a milieu he depicted in his fiction. Cassidy's Girl (1951) sold over a million copies, and he continued to write for paperback publishers, notably Gold Medal. There was a renewed interest in his novels when Francois Truffaut filmed Down There (1956) as the acclaimed Shoot the Piano Player (1960). Goodis died at 11:30pm on January 7, 1967, at Albert Einstein Medical Center, Northern Division, not far from his home. He was 49. His death certificate lists ‘cerebral vascular accident,' meaning a stroke, as the cause of death. Days earlier, Goodis had been beaten while resisting a robbery. Some have attributed his death to his injuries. It is also said that he keeled over while shoveling snow. He was buried in Roosevelt Memorial Park, in Pennsylvania. In 1963, ABC television began airing the television show The Fugitive, the story of Richard Kimble, a doctor wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife. Kimble subsequently escapes and begins a long search for the ‘one-armed man', the person he believes to be the real killer. Goodis stated that The Fugitive was based on his novel Dark Passage. In 1965, he sued United Artists-TV and ABC for $500,000, alleging copyright infringement. His cousin's law firm, Goodis, Greenfield, Narin and Mann, represented him and several groups supported him, including the Author's League of America, the Dramatist's Guild, and the American Book Publishers Association. Coudert Brothers represented United Artists and ABC. During a deposition on December 9, 1966, Goodis stated that The Saturday Evening Post had serialized Dark Passage, a fact that would become critical to the case. One month later, Goodis was dead. The lawsuit continued to wind its way through the courts, however. The dispute did not so much concern whether the theme of Dark Passage had been used, but whether the book was in the public domain. In a victory for UA and ABC, the District Court held that Goodis had, in effect, ‘donated his work to the public domain' when he published it in The Saturday Evening Post without using a copyright notice that listed his name. The Goodis estate appealed. In 1970, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed the lower court's decision and remanded the case for trial. The decision is reported at Goodis v. United Artists Television, Inc., 425 F.2d 397 (2nd Cir. 1970). The court wrote, ‘We unanimously conclude that where a magazine has purchased the right of first publication under circumstances which show that the author has no intention to donate his work to the public, copyright notice in the magazine's name is sufficient to obtain a valid copyright on behalf of the beneficial owner, the author or proprietor.' (425 F.2d 398-399). By then, Goodis's main beneficiary, his brother Herbert, was also dead. So in 1972, the Goodis estate agreed that the case now had only ‘nuisance value' and accepted $12,000 to settle the matter. Despite the significant difference between the initial claim and the final monetary settlement, the case is still regarded as a landmark decision in intellectual property rights and copyright law. After his death, his work went out of print in the United States, but he remained a popular favorite in France. In 1987, Black Lizard began to reissue Goodis titles. In 2007, Hard Case Crime published a new edition of The Wounded and the Slain for the first time in more than 50 years. Also in 2007, Street of No Return and Nightfall were re-published by Millipede Press. His novel Down There was reprinted as part of American Noir of the 1950s, in the Library of America. In March 2012, the Library of America published a selection of Goodis's novels under the title, David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 50s. Goodis has influenced contemporary crime fiction writers, notably Duane Swierczynski, and Ken Bruen. A character in Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 film Made in U.S.A. was named after Goodis.

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Black Friday by David Goodis. Berkeley. 1987. Black Lizard Books. 0887390285. 129 pages. paperback. Cover art by Kirwan.  

DESCRIPTION - From the author of Dark Passage, a riveting thriller about a doomed man sorting his way among the perverse loyalties and passions of a family of criminals. Filled with coiled menace and eerie authenticity, Black Friday is a foray into a world where no one has anything left to lose and malice is the only motive for survival.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Loeb Goodis (March 2, 1917 - January 7, 1967) was an American writer of crime fiction, noted for his prolific output of short stories and novels epitomizing the noir fiction genre. A native of Philadelphia, Goodis alternately resided there and in New York City and Hollywood during his professional years. Yet, throughout his life he maintained a deep identification with the city of his birth, Philadelphia. Goodis cultivated the skid row neighborhoods of his home town, using what he observed to craft his hard-boiled sagas of lives gone wrong, realized in dark portrayals of a blighted urban landscape teeming with criminal life and human despair. ‘Despite his [university] education, a combination of ethnicity (Jewish) and temperament allowed him to empathize with outsiders: the working poor, the unjustly accused, fugitives, criminals.' Goodis was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the oldest child of William Goodis and Mollie Halpern Goodis. William Goodis was a Russian-Jewish Emigre born in 1882, who had arrived in America with his mother in 1890. David Goodis's mother Mollie Halpern was born in Pennsylvania also into a family of Russian-Jewish Emigres. In Philadelphia, Goodis's father co-owned a newspaper dealership and later went into the textile business as the William Goodis Company. A brother, Jerome, born in 1920, died of meningitis at age three. In 1922, another brother, Herbert, was born into the family. In high school Goodis was engaged in student affairs, editing the school newspaper, serving as student council president, and participating in athletics as a member of both the track and swim teams. He also had the distinction of being chosen valedictorian for the graduating class of 1935, delivering a speech entitled ‘Youth Looks at Peace'. As a college student, he continued and expanded on the interests he had pursued as a high school student, contributing to the student newspaper as both writer and cartoonist. It was during this period he purportedly attempted his hand at novel writing, a book titled Ignited. The novel was never published, and no copy of it has been discovered. Goodis later claimed: ‘The title was prophetic. Eventually I threw it into the furnace.' Goodis graduated from Temple University in 1938 with a degree in journalism. While working at an advertising agency, Goodis started writing his first novel, Retreat from Oblivion. After it was published by Dutton in 1939, Goodis moved to New York City, where he wrote under several pseudonyms for pulp magazines, including Battle Birds, Daredevil Aces, Dime Mystery, Horror Stories, Terror Tales and Western Tales, sometimes churning out 10,000 words a day. The first pulp story published under his own name appeared in Gangland Detective Stories (November, 1939), titled ‘Mistress of the White Slave King'. Over a five-and-a-half-year period, according to some sources, he produced five million words for the pulp magazines. While the quantity of his output far eclipses that of his predecessors Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, unlike theirs, the vast majority of his pulp stories have never been reprinted. During the 1940s, Goodis scripted for radio adventure serials, including Hop Harrigan, House of Mystery, and Superman. Novels he wrote during the early 1940s were rejected by publishers, but in 1942 he spent some time in Hollywood as one of the screenwriters on Universal's Destination Unknown. His big break came in 1946 when his novel Dark Passage was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, published by Julian Messner and filmed for Warner Bros. with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall heading the cast. Delmer Daves directed what is now regarded as a classic film noir, and a first edition of the 1946 hardcover is valued at more than $800. Arriving in Hollywood, Goodis signed a six-year contract with Warner Brothers, working on story treatments and scripts. In 1947, Goodis wrote the script for The Unfaithful, a remake of Somerset Maugham's The Letter. Some of his scripts were never produced, such as Of Missing Persons and an adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake. Working with director Delmer Daves, he wrote a screen treatment for a film, Up Till Now, which Daves described as ‘giving people a look at themselves and their [American] heritage'. This film too was never made but Goodis used some of its elements in his 1954 novel, The Blonde on the Street Corner. Goodis is also credited with writing the screenplay to The Burglar, a 1957 film noir directed by Paul Wendkos that was based on his 1953 novel published by Lion Books. It was the only solely authored screenplay to be produced by him. The film was written and directed by Philadelphians, as well as being shot in Philadelphia. Dan Duryea and Jayne Mansfield were cast in the lead roles, and The Burglar still stands as one of the greatest heist films ever made. It was re-made in 1971 by Henri Verneuil as the French-Italian film Le Casse, starring Omar Sharif. Until recently, it was generally believed that Goodis never married. His friend Harold ‘Dutch' Silver said Goodis never spoke of a wife, and no wife was mentioned in Goodis's obituary. Attorney correspondence also repeatedly stated that Goodis never married. However, research by Larry Withers and Louis Boxer has produced a marriage license for Goodis and Elaine Astor. It shows that they were married on October 7, 1943 by Rabbi Jacob Samuel Robins, Ph.D., at Ohev Shalom Congregation, 525 South Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles. According to a divorce decree found in the attic of Philadelphia's City Hall, Astor received a divorce on January 18, 1946. Withers is Astor's son by a later marriage. He learned about her marriage to Goodis only after her death in 1986 from a stroke. In 1950, Goodis returned to Philadelphia where he lived with his parents and his schizophrenic brother Herbert. At night, he prowled the underside of Philadelphia, hanging out in nightclubs and seedy bars, a milieu he depicted in his fiction. Cassidy's Girl (1951) sold over a million copies, and he continued to write for paperback publishers, notably Gold Medal. There was a renewed interest in his novels when Francois Truffaut filmed Down There (1956) as the acclaimed Shoot the Piano Player (1960). Goodis died at 11:30pm on January 7, 1967, at Albert Einstein Medical Center, Northern Division, not far from his home. He was 49. His death certificate lists ‘cerebral vascular accident,' meaning a stroke, as the cause of death. Days earlier, Goodis had been beaten while resisting a robbery. Some have attributed his death to his injuries. It is also said that he keeled over while shoveling snow. He was buried in Roosevelt Memorial Park, in Pennsylvania. In 1963, ABC television began airing the television show The Fugitive, the story of Richard Kimble, a doctor wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife. Kimble subsequently escapes and begins a long search for the ‘one-armed man', the person he believes to be the real killer. Goodis stated that The Fugitive was based on his novel Dark Passage. In 1965, he sued United Artists-TV and ABC for $500,000, alleging copyright infringement. His cousin's law firm, Goodis, Greenfield, Narin and Mann, represented him and several groups supported him, including the Author's League of America, the Dramatist's Guild, and the American Book Publishers Association. Coudert Brothers represented United Artists and ABC. During a deposition on December 9, 1966, Goodis stated that The Saturday Evening Post had serialized Dark Passage, a fact that would become critical to the case. One month later, Goodis was dead. The lawsuit continued to wind its way through the courts, however. The dispute did not so much concern whether the theme of Dark Passage had been used, but whether the book was in the public domain. In a victory for UA and ABC, the District Court held that Goodis had, in effect, ‘donated his work to the public domain' when he published it in The Saturday Evening Post without using a copyright notice that listed his name. The Goodis estate appealed. In 1970, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed the lower court's decision and remanded the case for trial. The decision is reported at Goodis v. United Artists Television, Inc., 425 F.2d 397 (2nd Cir. 1970). The court wrote, ‘We unanimously conclude that where a magazine has purchased the right of first publication under circumstances which show that the author has no intention to donate his work to the public, copyright notice in the magazine's name is sufficient to obtain a valid copyright on behalf of the beneficial owner, the author or proprietor.' (425 F.2d 398-399). By then, Goodis's main beneficiary, his brother Herbert, was also dead. So in 1972, the Goodis estate agreed that the case now had only ‘nuisance value' and accepted $12,000 to settle the matter. Despite the significant difference between the initial claim and the final monetary settlement, the case is still regarded as a landmark decision in intellectual property rights and copyright law. After his death, his work went out of print in the United States, but he remained a popular favorite in France. In 1987, Black Lizard began to reissue Goodis titles. In 2007, Hard Case Crime published a new edition of The Wounded and the Slain for the first time in more than 50 years. Also in 2007, Street of No Return and Nightfall were re-published by Millipede Press. His novel Down There was reprinted as part of American Noir of the 1950s, in the Library of America. In March 2012, the Library of America published a selection of Goodis's novels under the title, David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 50s. Goodis has influenced contemporary crime fiction writers, notably Duane Swierczynski, and Ken Bruen. A character in Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 film Made in U.S.A. was named after Goodis.

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Behold This Woman by David Goodis. New York. 1948. Bantam Books. 214 pages. paperback. 407.   

DESCRIPTION - BEHOLD THIS WOMAN - Could she be anybody you know? Yes, she lived quietly with her husband . . . BUT she had errands at night. Yes, she wanted her step-daughter happy . . . BUT beat her into submission. Yes, she loved a man passionately . . . BUT she framed him. Yes, she just wanted to live well . . . BUT she had to murder to do it.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Loeb Goodis (March 2, 1917 - January 7, 1967) was an American writer of crime fiction, noted for his prolific output of short stories and novels epitomizing the noir fiction genre. A native of Philadelphia, Goodis alternately resided there and in New York City and Hollywood during his professional years. Yet, throughout his life he maintained a deep identification with the city of his birth, Philadelphia. Goodis cultivated the skid row neighborhoods of his home town, using what he observed to craft his hard-boiled sagas of lives gone wrong, realized in dark portrayals of a blighted urban landscape teeming with criminal life and human despair. ‘Despite his [university] education, a combination of ethnicity (Jewish) and temperament allowed him to empathize with outsiders: the working poor, the unjustly accused, fugitives, criminals.' Goodis was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the oldest child of William Goodis and Mollie Halpern Goodis. William Goodis was a Russian-Jewish Emigre born in 1882, who had arrived in America with his mother in 1890. David Goodis's mother Mollie Halpern was born in Pennsylvania also into a family of Russian-Jewish Emigres. In Philadelphia, Goodis's father co-owned a newspaper dealership and later went into the textile business as the William Goodis Company. A brother, Jerome, born in 1920, died of meningitis at age three. In 1922, another brother, Herbert, was born into the family. In high school Goodis was engaged in student affairs, editing the school newspaper, serving as student council president, and participating in athletics as a member of both the track and swim teams. He also had the distinction of being chosen valedictorian for the graduating class of 1935, delivering a speech entitled ‘Youth Looks at Peace'. As a college student, he continued and expanded on the interests he had pursued as a high school student, contributing to the student newspaper as both writer and cartoonist. It was during this period he purportedly attempted his hand at novel writing, a book titled Ignited. The novel was never published, and no copy of it has been discovered. Goodis later claimed: ‘The title was prophetic. Eventually I threw it into the furnace.' Goodis graduated from Temple University in 1938 with a degree in journalism. While working at an advertising agency, Goodis started writing his first novel, Retreat from Oblivion. After it was published by Dutton in 1939, Goodis moved to New York City, where he wrote under several pseudonyms for pulp magazines, including Battle Birds, Daredevil Aces, Dime Mystery, Horror Stories, Terror Tales and Western Tales, sometimes churning out 10,000 words a day. The first pulp story published under his own name appeared in Gangland Detective Stories (November, 1939), titled ‘Mistress of the White Slave King'. Over a five-and-a-half-year period, according to some sources, he produced five million words for the pulp magazines. While the quantity of his output far eclipses that of his predecessors Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, unlike theirs, the vast majority of his pulp stories have never been reprinted. During the 1940s, Goodis scripted for radio adventure serials, including Hop Harrigan, House of Mystery, and Superman. Novels he wrote during the early 1940s were rejected by publishers, but in 1942 he spent some time in Hollywood as one of the screenwriters on Universal's Destination Unknown. His big break came in 1946 when his novel Dark Passage was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, published by Julian Messner and filmed for Warner Bros. with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall heading the cast. Delmer Daves directed what is now regarded as a classic film noir, and a first edition of the 1946 hardcover is valued at more than $800. Arriving in Hollywood, Goodis signed a six-year contract with Warner Brothers, working on story treatments and scripts. In 1947, Goodis wrote the script for The Unfaithful, a remake of Somerset Maugham's The Letter. Some of his scripts were never produced, such as Of Missing Persons and an adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake. Working with director Delmer Daves, he wrote a screen treatment for a film, Up Till Now, which Daves described as ‘giving people a look at themselves and their [American] heritage'. This film too was never made but Goodis used some of its elements in his 1954 novel, The Blonde on the Street Corner. Goodis is also credited with writing the screenplay to The Burglar, a 1957 film noir directed by Paul Wendkos that was based on his 1953 novel published by Lion Books. It was the only solely authored screenplay to be produced by him. The film was written and directed by Philadelphians, as well as being shot in Philadelphia. Dan Duryea and Jayne Mansfield were cast in the lead roles, and The Burglar still stands as one of the greatest heist films ever made. It was re-made in 1971 by Henri Verneuil as the French-Italian film Le Casse, starring Omar Sharif. Until recently, it was generally believed that Goodis never married. His friend Harold ‘Dutch' Silver said Goodis never spoke of a wife, and no wife was mentioned in Goodis's obituary. Attorney correspondence also repeatedly stated that Goodis never married. However, research by Larry Withers and Louis Boxer has produced a marriage license for Goodis and Elaine Astor. It shows that they were married on October 7, 1943 by Rabbi Jacob Samuel Robins, Ph.D., at Ohev Shalom Congregation, 525 South Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles. According to a divorce decree found in the attic of Philadelphia's City Hall, Astor received a divorce on January 18, 1946. Withers is Astor's son by a later marriage. He learned about her marriage to Goodis only after her death in 1986 from a stroke. In 1950, Goodis returned to Philadelphia where he lived with his parents and his schizophrenic brother Herbert. At night, he prowled the underside of Philadelphia, hanging out in nightclubs and seedy bars, a milieu he depicted in his fiction. Cassidy's Girl (1951) sold over a million copies, and he continued to write for paperback publishers, notably Gold Medal. There was a renewed interest in his novels when Francois Truffaut filmed Down There (1956) as the acclaimed Shoot the Piano Player (1960). Goodis died at 11:30pm on January 7, 1967, at Albert Einstein Medical Center, Northern Division, not far from his home. He was 49. His death certificate lists ‘cerebral vascular accident,' meaning a stroke, as the cause of death. Days earlier, Goodis had been beaten while resisting a robbery. Some have attributed his death to his injuries. It is also said that he keeled over while shoveling snow. He was buried in Roosevelt Memorial Park, in Pennsylvania. In 1963, ABC television began airing the television show The Fugitive, the story of Richard Kimble, a doctor wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife. Kimble subsequently escapes and begins a long search for the ‘one-armed man', the person he believes to be the real killer. Goodis stated that The Fugitive was based on his novel Dark Passage. In 1965, he sued United Artists-TV and ABC for $500,000, alleging copyright infringement. His cousin's law firm, Goodis, Greenfield, Narin and Mann, represented him and several groups supported him, including the Author's League of America, the Dramatist's Guild, and the American Book Publishers Association. Coudert Brothers represented United Artists and ABC. During a deposition on December 9, 1966, Goodis stated that The Saturday Evening Post had serialized Dark Passage, a fact that would become critical to the case. One month later, Goodis was dead. The lawsuit continued to wind its way through the courts, however. The dispute did not so much concern whether the theme of Dark Passage had been used, but whether the book was in the public domain. In a victory for UA and ABC, the District Court held that Goodis had, in effect, ‘donated his work to the public domain' when he published it in The Saturday Evening Post without using a copyright notice that listed his name. The Goodis estate appealed. In 1970, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed the lower court's decision and remanded the case for trial. The decision is reported at Goodis v. United Artists Television, Inc., 425 F.2d 397 (2nd Cir. 1970). The court wrote, ‘We unanimously conclude that where a magazine has purchased the right of first publication under circumstances which show that the author has no intention to donate his work to the public, copyright notice in the magazine's name is sufficient to obtain a valid copyright on behalf of the beneficial owner, the author or proprietor.' (425 F.2d 398-399). By then, Goodis's main beneficiary, his brother Herbert, was also dead. So in 1972, the Goodis estate agreed that the case now had only ‘nuisance value' and accepted $12,000 to settle the matter. Despite the significant difference between the initial claim and the final monetary settlement, the case is still regarded as a landmark decision in intellectual property rights and copyright law. After his death, his work went out of print in the United States, but he remained a popular favorite in France. In 1987, Black Lizard began to reissue Goodis titles. In 2007, Hard Case Crime published a new edition of The Wounded and the Slain for the first time in more than 50 years. Also in 2007, Street of No Return and Nightfall were re-published by Millipede Press. His novel Down There was reprinted as part of American Noir of the 1950s, in the Library of America. In March 2012, the Library of America published a selection of Goodis's novels under the title, David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 50s. Goodis has influenced contemporary crime fiction writers, notably Duane Swierczynski, and Ken Bruen. A character in Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 film Made in U.S.A. was named after Goodis.

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The Wounded and the Slain by David Goodis. New York. 1955. Fawcett Gold Medal. 174 pages. paperback. 530.  

DESCRIPTION - He was a trespasser in heaven - and a fugitive from hell. James Bevan was born too late. He was a walking tragedy - a knight in a century of grab-and-run, a lost man of honor in a glib, glittering world. He had a mistress who wanted him, a wife who rejected him, and a bottle that enfolded him in the arms of oblivion. He was balanced on the edge of civilized disaster - and then he went to Jamaica. In that jungle of the flesh James Bevan sought the end. He found instead a target for his honor, and, in so doing, and in fear and in agony, he found a new beginning for himself. Bur first he had to kill a man.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Loeb Goodis (March 2, 1917 - January 7, 1967) was an American writer of crime fiction, noted for his prolific output of short stories and novels epitomizing the noir fiction genre. A native of Philadelphia, Goodis alternately resided there and in New York City and Hollywood during his professional years. Yet, throughout his life he maintained a deep identification with the city of his birth, Philadelphia. Goodis cultivated the skid row neighborhoods of his home town, using what he observed to craft his hard-boiled sagas of lives gone wrong, realized in dark portrayals of a blighted urban landscape teeming with criminal life and human despair. ‘Despite his [university] education, a combination of ethnicity (Jewish) and temperament allowed him to empathize with outsiders: the working poor, the unjustly accused, fugitives, criminals.' Goodis was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the oldest child of William Goodis and Mollie Halpern Goodis. William Goodis was a Russian-Jewish Emigre born in 1882, who had arrived in America with his mother in 1890. David Goodis's mother Mollie Halpern was born in Pennsylvania also into a family of Russian-Jewish Emigres. In Philadelphia, Goodis's father co-owned a newspaper dealership and later went into the textile business as the William Goodis Company. A brother, Jerome, born in 1920, died of meningitis at age three. In 1922, another brother, Herbert, was born into the family. In high school Goodis was engaged in student affairs, editing the school newspaper, serving as student council president, and participating in athletics as a member of both the track and swim teams. He also had the distinction of being chosen valedictorian for the graduating class of 1935, delivering a speech entitled ‘Youth Looks at Peace'. As a college student, he continued and expanded on the interests he had pursued as a high school student, contributing to the student newspaper as both writer and cartoonist. It was during this period he purportedly attempted his hand at novel writing, a book titled Ignited. The novel was never published, and no copy of it has been discovered. Goodis later claimed: ‘The title was prophetic. Eventually I threw it into the furnace.' Goodis graduated from Temple University in 1938 with a degree in journalism. While working at an advertising agency, Goodis started writing his first novel, Retreat from Oblivion. After it was published by Dutton in 1939, Goodis moved to New York City, where he wrote under several pseudonyms for pulp magazines, including Battle Birds, Daredevil Aces, Dime Mystery, Horror Stories, Terror Tales and Western Tales, sometimes churning out 10,000 words a day. The first pulp story published under his own name appeared in Gangland Detective Stories (November, 1939), titled ‘Mistress of the White Slave King'. Over a five-and-a-half-year period, according to some sources, he produced five million words for the pulp magazines. While the quantity of his output far eclipses that of his predecessors Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, unlike theirs, the vast majority of his pulp stories have never been reprinted. During the 1940s, Goodis scripted for radio adventure serials, including Hop Harrigan, House of Mystery, and Superman. Novels he wrote during the early 1940s were rejected by publishers, but in 1942 he spent some time in Hollywood as one of the screenwriters on Universal's Destination Unknown. His big break came in 1946 when his novel Dark Passage was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, published by Julian Messner and filmed for Warner Bros. with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall heading the cast. Delmer Daves directed what is now regarded as a classic film noir, and a first edition of the 1946 hardcover is valued at more than $800. Arriving in Hollywood, Goodis signed a six-year contract with Warner Brothers, working on story treatments and scripts. In 1947, Goodis wrote the script for The Unfaithful, a remake of Somerset Maugham's The Letter. Some of his scripts were never produced, such as Of Missing Persons and an adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake. Working with director Delmer Daves, he wrote a screen treatment for a film, Up Till Now, which Daves described as ‘giving people a look at themselves and their [American] heritage'. This film too was never made but Goodis used some of its elements in his 1954 novel, The Blonde on the Street Corner. Goodis is also credited with writing the screenplay to The Burglar, a 1957 film noir directed by Paul Wendkos that was based on his 1953 novel published by Lion Books. It was the only solely authored screenplay to be produced by him. The film was written and directed by Philadelphians, as well as being shot in Philadelphia. Dan Duryea and Jayne Mansfield were cast in the lead roles, and The Burglar still stands as one of the greatest heist films ever made. It was re-made in 1971 by Henri Verneuil as the French-Italian film Le Casse, starring Omar Sharif. Until recently, it was generally believed that Goodis never married. His friend Harold ‘Dutch' Silver said Goodis never spoke of a wife, and no wife was mentioned in Goodis's obituary. Attorney correspondence also repeatedly stated that Goodis never married. However, research by Larry Withers and Louis Boxer has produced a marriage license for Goodis and Elaine Astor. It shows that they were married on October 7, 1943 by Rabbi Jacob Samuel Robins, Ph.D., at Ohev Shalom Congregation, 525 South Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles. According to a divorce decree found in the attic of Philadelphia's City Hall, Astor received a divorce on January 18, 1946. Withers is Astor's son by a later marriage. He learned about her marriage to Goodis only after her death in 1986 from a stroke. In 1950, Goodis returned to Philadelphia where he lived with his parents and his schizophrenic brother Herbert. At night, he prowled the underside of Philadelphia, hanging out in nightclubs and seedy bars, a milieu he depicted in his fiction. Cassidy's Girl (1951) sold over a million copies, and he continued to write for paperback publishers, notably Gold Medal. There was a renewed interest in his novels when Francois Truffaut filmed Down There (1956) as the acclaimed Shoot the Piano Player (1960). Goodis died at 11:30pm on January 7, 1967, at Albert Einstein Medical Center, Northern Division, not far from his home. He was 49. His death certificate lists ‘cerebral vascular accident,' meaning a stroke, as the cause of death. Days earlier, Goodis had been beaten while resisting a robbery. Some have attributed his death to his injuries. It is also said that he keeled over while shoveling snow. He was buried in Roosevelt Memorial Park, in Pennsylvania. In 1963, ABC television began airing the television show The Fugitive, the story of Richard Kimble, a doctor wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife. Kimble subsequently escapes and begins a long search for the ‘one-armed man', the person he believes to be the real killer. Goodis stated that The Fugitive was based on his novel Dark Passage. In 1965, he sued United Artists-TV and ABC for $500,000, alleging copyright infringement. His cousin's law firm, Goodis, Greenfield, Narin and Mann, represented him and several groups supported him, including the Author's League of America, the Dramatist's Guild, and the American Book Publishers Association. Coudert Brothers represented United Artists and ABC. During a deposition on December 9, 1966, Goodis stated that The Saturday Evening Post had serialized Dark Passage, a fact that would become critical to the case. One month later, Goodis was dead. The lawsuit continued to wind its way through the courts, however. The dispute did not so much concern whether the theme of Dark Passage had been used, but whether the book was in the public domain. In a victory for UA and ABC, the District Court held that Goodis had, in effect, ‘donated his work to the public domain' when he published it in The Saturday Evening Post without using a copyright notice that listed his name. The Goodis estate appealed. In 1970, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed the lower court's decision and remanded the case for trial. The decision is reported at Goodis v. United Artists Television, Inc., 425 F.2d 397 (2nd Cir. 1970). The court wrote, ‘We unanimously conclude that where a magazine has purchased the right of first publication under circumstances which show that the author has no intention to donate his work to the public, copyright notice in the magazine's name is sufficient to obtain a valid copyright on behalf of the beneficial owner, the author or proprietor.' (425 F.2d 398-399). By then, Goodis's main beneficiary, his brother Herbert, was also dead. So in 1972, the Goodis estate agreed that the case now had only ‘nuisance value' and accepted $12,000 to settle the matter. Despite the significant difference between the initial claim and the final monetary settlement, the case is still regarded as a landmark decision in intellectual property rights and copyright law. After his death, his work went out of print in the United States, but he remained a popular favorite in France. In 1987, Black Lizard began to reissue Goodis titles. In 2007, Hard Case Crime published a new edition of The Wounded and the Slain for the first time in more than 50 years. Also in 2007, Street of No Return and Nightfall were re-published by Millipede Press. His novel Down There was reprinted as part of American Noir of the 1950s, in the Library of America. In March 2012, the Library of America published a selection of Goodis's novels under the title, David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 50s. Goodis has influenced contemporary crime fiction writers, notably Duane Swierczynski, and Ken Bruen. A character in Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 film Made in U.S.A. was named after Goodis.

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Down There by David Goodis. New York. 1956. Fawcett Gold Medal. A Fawcett Gold Medal paperback original. 157 pages. paperback. 623. Cover painting by Mitchell Hooks.  

DESCRIPTION - From the great concert halls of the world - he descended the stairway to hell. DOWN THERE. . . was Eddie, behind the battered piano in Harriet’s Hut, a rickety gin palace at the dark dead end of Skid Row. DOWN THERE . . . was a million lights years away from Carnegie Hall, and from Edward Webster Lyn - the young genius for whom audiences once had rioted. It has been a long, anguished journey, but now Eddie was safe - in a dream world where the only sound was music and the people were ghosts. Then flesh and blood called Eddie back - in the form of a woman who demanded his love, and in a pattern of sudden, final violence. Life jolted Eddie from his dream - and he woke in a wet back alley, standing over a dead man, with a knife in his hand. A fast-moving hardboiled noir novel of a piano player with another life, from which Francois Truffaut's film, "Shoot the Piano Player" was subsequently made.

In a Black Lizard edition with a different title:

Shoot the Piano Player by David Goodis. Berkeley. 1987. Black Lizard Books. 0887390307. Originally Published by Fawcett In 1956. 156 pages. paperback. Cover art by Kirwan.

DESCRIPTION - Once upon a time Eddie played conert piano to reverent audiences at Carnegie Hall. Now he bangs out honky-tonk for drunks in a dive in Philadelphia. But then two people walk into Eddie's life - the first promising Eddie a future, the other dragging him back into a treacherous past. Shoot the Piano Player is a bittersweet and nerve-racking exploration of different kinds of loyalty: the kind a man owes his family, no matter how bad that family is; the kind a man owes a woman; and, ultimately, the loyalty he owes himself. The result is a moody thriller that, like the best hard-boiled fiction, carries a moral depth charge.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Loeb Goodis (March 2, 1917 - January 7, 1967) was an American writer of crime fiction, noted for his prolific output of short stories and novels epitomizing the noir fiction genre. A native of Philadelphia, Goodis alternately resided there and in New York City and Hollywood during his professional years. Yet, throughout his life he maintained a deep identification with the city of his birth, Philadelphia. Goodis cultivated the skid row neighborhoods of his home town, using what he observed to craft his hard-boiled sagas of lives gone wrong, realized in dark portrayals of a blighted urban landscape teeming with criminal life and human despair. ‘Despite his [university] education, a combination of ethnicity (Jewish) and temperament allowed him to empathize with outsiders: the working poor, the unjustly accused, fugitives, criminals.' Goodis was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the oldest child of William Goodis and Mollie Halpern Goodis. William Goodis was a Russian-Jewish Emigre born in 1882, who had arrived in America with his mother in 1890. David Goodis's mother Mollie Halpern was born in Pennsylvania also into a family of Russian-Jewish Emigres. In Philadelphia, Goodis's father co-owned a newspaper dealership and later went into the textile business as the William Goodis Company. A brother, Jerome, born in 1920, died of meningitis at age three. In 1922, another brother, Herbert, was born into the family. In high school Goodis was engaged in student affairs, editing the school newspaper, serving as student council president, and participating in athletics as a member of both the track and swim teams. He also had the distinction of being chosen valedictorian for the graduating class of 1935, delivering a speech entitled ‘Youth Looks at Peace'. As a college student, he continued and expanded on the interests he had pursued as a high school student, contributing to the student newspaper as both writer and cartoonist. It was during this period he purportedly attempted his hand at novel writing, a book titled Ignited. The novel was never published, and no copy of it has been discovered. Goodis later claimed: ‘The title was prophetic. Eventually I threw it into the furnace.' Goodis graduated from Temple University in 1938 with a degree in journalism. While working at an advertising agency, Goodis started writing his first novel, Retreat from Oblivion. After it was published by Dutton in 1939, Goodis moved to New York City, where he wrote under several pseudonyms for pulp magazines, including Battle Birds, Daredevil Aces, Dime Mystery, Horror Stories, Terror Tales and Western Tales, sometimes churning out 10,000 words a day. The first pulp story published under his own name appeared in Gangland Detective Stories (November, 1939), titled ‘Mistress of the White Slave King'. Over a five-and-a-half-year period, according to some sources, he produced five million words for the pulp magazines. While the quantity of his output far eclipses that of his predecessors Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, unlike theirs, the vast majority of his pulp stories have never been reprinted. During the 1940s, Goodis scripted for radio adventure serials, including Hop Harrigan, House of Mystery, and Superman. Novels he wrote during the early 1940s were rejected by publishers, but in 1942 he spent some time in Hollywood as one of the screenwriters on Universal's Destination Unknown. His big break came in 1946 when his novel Dark Passage was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, published by Julian Messner and filmed for Warner Bros. with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall heading the cast. Delmer Daves directed what is now regarded as a classic film noir, and a first edition of the 1946 hardcover is valued at more than $800. Arriving in Hollywood, Goodis signed a six-year contract with Warner Brothers, working on story treatments and scripts. In 1947, Goodis wrote the script for The Unfaithful, a remake of Somerset Maugham's The Letter. Some of his scripts were never produced, such as Of Missing Persons and an adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake. Working with director Delmer Daves, he wrote a screen treatment for a film, Up Till Now, which Daves described as ‘giving people a look at themselves and their [American] heritage'. This film too was never made but Goodis used some of its elements in his 1954 novel, The Blonde on the Street Corner. Goodis is also credited with writing the screenplay to The Burglar, a 1957 film noir directed by Paul Wendkos that was based on his 1953 novel published by Lion Books. It was the only solely authored screenplay to be produced by him. The film was written and directed by Philadelphians, as well as being shot in Philadelphia. Dan Duryea and Jayne Mansfield were cast in the lead roles, and The Burglar still stands as one of the greatest heist films ever made. It was re-made in 1971 by Henri Verneuil as the French-Italian film Le Casse, starring Omar Sharif. Until recently, it was generally believed that Goodis never married. His friend Harold ‘Dutch' Silver said Goodis never spoke of a wife, and no wife was mentioned in Goodis's obituary. Attorney correspondence also repeatedly stated that Goodis never married. However, research by Larry Withers and Louis Boxer has produced a marriage license for Goodis and Elaine Astor. It shows that they were married on October 7, 1943 by Rabbi Jacob Samuel Robins, Ph.D., at Ohev Shalom Congregation, 525 South Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles. According to a divorce decree found in the attic of Philadelphia's City Hall, Astor received a divorce on January 18, 1946. Withers is Astor's son by a later marriage. He learned about her marriage to Goodis only after her death in 1986 from a stroke. In 1950, Goodis returned to Philadelphia where he lived with his parents and his schizophrenic brother Herbert. At night, he prowled the underside of Philadelphia, hanging out in nightclubs and seedy bars, a milieu he depicted in his fiction. Cassidy's Girl (1951) sold over a million copies, and he continued to write for paperback publishers, notably Gold Medal. There was a renewed interest in his novels when Francois Truffaut filmed Down There (1956) as the acclaimed Shoot the Piano Player (1960). Goodis died at 11:30pm on January 7, 1967, at Albert Einstein Medical Center, Northern Division, not far from his home. He was 49. His death certificate lists ‘cerebral vascular accident,' meaning a stroke, as the cause of death. Days earlier, Goodis had been beaten while resisting a robbery. Some have attributed his death to his injuries. It is also said that he keeled over while shoveling snow. He was buried in Roosevelt Memorial Park, in Pennsylvania. In 1963, ABC television began airing the television show The Fugitive, the story of Richard Kimble, a doctor wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife. Kimble subsequently escapes and begins a long search for the ‘one-armed man', the person he believes to be the real killer. Goodis stated that The Fugitive was based on his novel Dark Passage. In 1965, he sued United Artists-TV and ABC for $500,000, alleging copyright infringement. His cousin's law firm, Goodis, Greenfield, Narin and Mann, represented him and several groups supported him, including the Author's League of America, the Dramatist's Guild, and the American Book Publishers Association. Coudert Brothers represented United Artists and ABC. During a deposition on December 9, 1966, Goodis stated that The Saturday Evening Post had serialized Dark Passage, a fact that would become critical to the case. One month later, Goodis was dead. The lawsuit continued to wind its way through the courts, however. The dispute did not so much concern whether the theme of Dark Passage had been used, but whether the book was in the public domain. In a victory for UA and ABC, the District Court held that Goodis had, in effect, ‘donated his work to the public domain' when he published it in The Saturday Evening Post without using a copyright notice that listed his name. The Goodis estate appealed. In 1970, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed the lower court's decision and remanded the case for trial. The decision is reported at Goodis v. United Artists Television, Inc., 425 F.2d 397 (2nd Cir. 1970). The court wrote, ‘We unanimously conclude that where a magazine has purchased the right of first publication under circumstances which show that the author has no intention to donate his work to the public, copyright notice in the magazine's name is sufficient to obtain a valid copyright on behalf of the beneficial owner, the author or proprietor.' (425 F.2d 398-399). By then, Goodis's main beneficiary, his brother Herbert, was also dead. So in 1972, the Goodis estate agreed that the case now had only ‘nuisance value' and accepted $12,000 to settle the matter. Despite the significant difference between the initial claim and the final monetary settlement, the case is still regarded as a landmark decision in intellectual property rights and copyright law. After his death, his work went out of print in the United States, but he remained a popular favorite in France. In 1987, Black Lizard began to reissue Goodis titles. In 2007, Hard Case Crime published a new edition of The Wounded and the Slain for the first time in more than 50 years. Also in 2007, Street of No Return and Nightfall were re-published by Millipede Press. His novel Down There was reprinted as part of American Noir of the 1950s, in the Library of America. In March 2012, the Library of America published a selection of Goodis's novels under the title, David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 50s. Goodis has influenced contemporary crime fiction writers, notably Duane Swierczynski, and Ken Bruen. A character in Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 film Made in U.S.A. was named after Goodis.

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Inner City Blues: A Charlotte Justice Mystery by Paula L. Woods. New York. 1999. Norton. 039304680x. 316 pages. hardcover. Jacket photograph of Los Angeles by Stephen Simpson.  

DESCRIPTION - Meet Detective Charlotte Justice, a black woman in the very white, very male, and sometimes very hostile Los Angeles Police Department. The time is 48 hours into the epochal L.A. riots and she and her fellow officers are exhausted. She saves the curfew-breaking black doctor Lance Mitchell from a potentially lethal beating from some white officers only to discover nearby the body of one-time radical Cinque Lewis, a thug who years before had murdered her husband and daughter. Was it a random shooting or was Mitchell responsible? And what had brought Lewis back to a city he'd long since fled? Charlotte's quest for the truth behind Cinque's death will set her at odds with the LAPD hierarchy, plunge her into the intricacies of everything from L.A.'s gang-banging politics to its black blue-bloods, and lead her into deep emotional waters with Mitchell's partner (and her old flame), Dr. Aubrey Scott.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paula L. Woods is the author of the Charlotte Justice mystery series. The first novel in the series, INNER CITY BLUES (1999), was on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list for three weeks and was also named by the newspaper as one of the best books of 1999. Inner City Blues received the Macavity Award for Best First Mystery, was named Best First Novel by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, and was nominated for the Edgar and Anthony awards for best first mystery novel. Paula began writing mysteries after studying the genre and editing the critically acclaimed anthology SPOOKS, SPIES, AND PRIVATE EYES: BLACK MYSTERY, CRIME, AND SUSPENSE FICTION OF THE 20TH CENTURY (1995). Although SPOOKS, SPIES was nominated for an Anthony Award, Macavity Award, and received a special award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, A member of the National Book Critics Circle, she reviews books regularly for the Los Angeles Times and has served a a mystery columnist for the Washington Post.

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Violent Spring: An Ivan Monk Mystery by Gary Phillips. Portland. 1994. West Coast Crime. 1883303133. 277 pages. paperback. Cover art by Mohammad Smith.  

DESCRIPTION - In one of the hottest debut mysteries in years, African-American private investigator Ivan Monk must investigate the murder of a Korean shopkeeper in riot-torn, racially-charged Los Angeles . . . WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING - ‘ . . . Tough, smart, and unabashedly political, Monk is (to paraphrase basketball sart Charles Barkley) a P.I. for the nineties, and Violent Spring is Phillip's perfect intro to him.' - Gar Anthony Haywood . . . ‘Ivan Monk traverses the terrain of the boosters and mercenaries who run Blade Runnerville. He is an unbowed post-modern protagonist who with brains and brawn confronts this Hobbesian universe in his quest for the answers. Violent spring peels away the studded rind of the golden orange, exposing its dete noir core.' - Mike Davis.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gary Phillips (b. 1955) is a critically acclaimed author of mysteries and graphic novels. Raised in South Central Los Angeles, Phillips grew up reading comics, classic pulp and detective fiction, and the likes of Iceberg Slim and took inspiration from all this when he created his first series character, Ivan Monk, in the early 1990s. A private detective adept at navigating the racial tensions of modern L. A. and beyond, Monk has appeared in four novels and one short story collection, Monkology (2011). Phillips introduced his second series character, Martha Chainey, in High Hand (2000), and followed that rollicking tale of a showgirl's mafia troubles with another book and short story. Besides writing several stand alones like The Jook and The Underbelly, and editing anthologies such as Orange County Noir, Phillips has found success in the field of graphic novels, penning illustrated stories such as The Rinse and High Rollers. When not writing, he spends his time smoking the occasional cigar and pondering why his poker abilities haven't improved. Phillips continues to live and work in Los Angeles.

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Perdition, U.S.A. by Gary Phillips. Salem. 1996. John Brown Books. 0963905066. The Second Ivan Monk Mystery. 255 pages. paperback. Cover art by Mohammad Smith.  

DESCRIPTION - The mystery series that launched Gary Phillips's career. When three young black men are gunned down within blocks on one another, Ivan Monk investigates for a possible link--and finds himself on the trail of a racial conspiracy centered in a small Northwestern town. Robert “Scatterboy” Williams is a small-time hustler selling bogus Cartier watches in Pacific Shores, a port city south of Los Angeles. One day, he’s gunned down in the street, seemingly at random. Then drug dealer Ronny Aaron is shot and killed leaving a liquor store. Shortly thereafter, college student Jimmy Henderson is rendered comatose after two bullets to his body. The three victims have nothing in common save the neighborhood where they were shot—and the color of their skin. The police categorize Scatterboy’s murder as business as usual. But his girlfriend convinces private eye Ivan Monk to find the killer. What looks like three unrelated shootings of Black men in Southern California will put Monk on a tortuous trail unraveling a larger nefarious plan: the rise of an extremist demagogue.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gary Phillips (b. 1955) is a critically acclaimed author of mysteries and graphic novels. Raised in South Central Los Angeles, Phillips grew up reading comics, classic pulp and detective fiction, and the likes of Iceberg Slim and took inspiration from all this when he created his first series character, Ivan Monk, in the early 1990s. A private detective adept at navigating the racial tensions of modern L. A. and beyond, Monk has appeared in four novels and one short story collection, Monkology (2011). Phillips introduced his second series character, Martha Chainey, in High Hand (2000), and followed that rollicking tale of a showgirl's mafia troubles with another book and short story. Besides writing several stand alones like The Jook and The Underbelly, and editing anthologies such as Orange County Noir, Phillips has found success in the field of graphic novels, penning illustrated stories such as The Rinse and High Rollers. When not writing, he spends his time smoking the occasional cigar and pondering why his poker abilities haven't improved. Phillips continues to live and work in Los Angeles.

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